Katzenjammer Kids — "How to Cook Poi!"

Twelve packed color panels follow the Captain, Mama, Hans, Fritz, and a Hawaiian prince through a poi-cooking misadventure that ends in volcanic chaos. The gags run on slapstick escalation: a rolling free-poi cart triggers a mob, the dish proves scorchingly inedible, and a volcano supplies the punchline. Rudolph Dirks created The Katzenjammer Kids for Hearst papers in 1897, directly modeling it on Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz. His strip codified the Sunday page's visual grammar — sequential numbered panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast, and color as narrative tool — making it a direct ancestor of the comic book format that would coalesce by the 1930s. This page is among the oldest continuously running comic strips still identifiable today.