The Katzenjammer Kids — Omaha Sunday Bee, June 21, 1914

Twelve panels follow Hans, Fritz, and the Captain on a bear hunt that goes badly wrong: the boys egg the Captain into confronting a grizzly, the bear wins, and the Captain ends up rescued by rope and dunked in a washtub. Rudolph Dirks launched The Katzenjammer Kids in the New York Journal in 1897, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. The Sunday full-page format seen here — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, slapstick continuity across a single sheet — was the direct ancestor of the comic book, a format that would be standardized by reprinting exactly these pages in pamphlet form through the 1930s. Dirks's clear brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and elastic figure comedy set the visual grammar that cartoonists would use for a century.