Katzenjammer Kids

Six panels follow the Captain's attempt to demonstrate his old army-surgeon skills on a horse, with Hans and Fritz egging him on while the animal bucks and rolls him flat. Speech balloons carry the strip's signature comic-German dialect — "Dod gast it," "Hoop-la" — and the slapstick escalates panel by panel until the Captain lands in the dirt. Rudolph Dirks launched The Katzenjammer Kids in the New York Journal in 1897, directly inspired by Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz. Along with Outcault's Yellow Kid, it was among the earliest strips to deploy recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons — the visual grammar that Sunday newspaper pages would export wholesale into the first comic books three decades later.