The Katzenjammer Kids — Omaha Sunday Bee, November 10, 1912

Twelve panels of cheerful mayhem: Mama, rendered as a stout German-immigrant matron in a polka-dot dress, attempts to bake biscuits while the Kids and assorted frogs conspire to ruin her. The dough explodes, she screams Himmel vot iss!, chaos floods the yard. Rudolph Dirks launched the strip in 1897, directly adapting Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz, and codified what we now call comics grammar — sequential panels of equal size, speech balloons carrying dialect humor, a cast of recurring characters whose personalities drive every gag. Sunday pages like this one, printed in color broadsheets and syndicated nationally, were the direct material ancestors of the comic book format that would emerge in the 1930s.