The Katzenjammer Kids — Omaha Sunday Bee, June 14, 1914

Twelve numbered panels plus a header strip follow Hans and Fritz — identical mischief-making twins in sailor suits — as they tie a rope to a scaffold swing and torment the Inspector and the Captain while Mrs. Katzenjammer looks on. The gag turns on the word "stop": each adult shouts it, the boys obey literally, then exploit the pause for the next prank. Panel 11 delivers the payoff: the scaffold collapses, leaving everyone in a heap. Rudolf Dirks launched the strip in 1897 for the Hearst syndicate, directly modeling it on Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz. Its large-format Sunday pages — with speech balloons, sequential numbered panels, and a fixed cast — helped standardize the visual grammar that four decades later became the comic book.