Katzenjammer Kids — 1913-02-16

"The Flower of the Army!" Twelve panels follow the Captain's new royal guard, Umji, assigned by King Heinie to protect the perpetually napping Captain. The strip's engine is simple: Umji, disciplined and spear-carrying, discovers his charge asleep, prods him awake repeatedly, and is ultimately rebuffed and dismissed. Rudolph Dirks launched The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897 for Hearst's New York Journal, directly adapting Wilhelm Busch's German picture-story Max und Moritz. The strip codified sequential panel grids, integrated speech balloons, and established recurring cast comedy as the Sunday page's dominant form — conventions every subsequent comic book inherited wholesale. By 1913 the strip was already sixteen years old and globally syndicated, its visual grammar fully mature.