The Katzenjammer Kids — Omaha Sunday Bee, June 7, 1914

Visible at the foot of this front page, the tease line — Back Again! The Katzenjammer Kids. See Comic Section — points readers to Hans and Fritz, the incorrigible twin brothers created by Rudolph Dirks for the New York Journal in 1897. Running since that year without interruption, the strip is among the oldest continuously published comics in the world. Dirks borrowed the boys directly from Wilhelm Busch's 1865 illustrated story Max und Moritz, then embedded them inside a grid of sequential panels with speech balloons — the precise visual machinery that would define newspaper Sunday pages and, by the 1930s, the comic book format itself. By 1914 the strip appeared in syndication coast to coast, reaching millions of readers each Sunday.