The Katzenjammer Kids — "The Education of a Monkey"

Six panels follow Hans and Fritz, Rudolph Dirks's incorrigible German-American twins, as they teach a pet monkey to swing a bat — with predictable results for the Captain and Mama. The strip demonstrates Dirks's confident command of sequential cartooning: numbered panels, expressive speech balloons rendered in fractured dialect, and escalating physical chaos resolved in a final comeuppance. Dirks launched The Katzenjammer Kids in the New York Journal in 1897, directly inspired by Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz. It is among the earliest strips to systematize the recurring-cast comic page — the very format that Sunday newspaper supplements would refine into a mass medium, laying the structural groundwork from which the comic book would directly emerge two decades later.