The Katzenjammer Kids — St. Louis Republic, February 22, 1903

This Sunday page from the St. Louis Republic carries one of America's oldest surviving comic strips, The Katzenjammer Kids, created by Rudolph Dirks for William Randolph Hearst's syndicate in 1897. Dirks borrowed directly from Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz, transplanting two anarchic German-American boys — Hans and Fritz — whose sole occupation is tormenting the Captain and the Inspector through elaborate physical pranks. The strip's panel-by-panel escalation of chaos, with action lines, exaggerated facial contortions, and early speech balloons, helped codify the visual grammar that would define the comic form. Sunday color supplements in papers like this one were the direct predecessors of the comic book, their broadsheet pages later cut, stapled, and sold as the first newsstand pamphlets of the 1930s.