The Katzenjammer Kids — The Sun (New York), April 14, 1918

This Sunday page from The Sun (New York) reproduces The Katzenjammer Kids, the strip Rudolf Dirks launched in The New York Journal in 1897, modeling his mischievous twin brothers Hans and Fritz on Wilhelm Busch's German picture-story Max und Moritz. By 1918 the strip had already survived a landmark legal battle splitting Dirks from Hearst, leaving two parallel versions running simultaneously in competing papers. The Kids' anarchic multi-panel sequences — pratfalls visited on the Captain and the Inspector, speech balloons thick with comic-German dialect, cause-and-effect gag chains running left to right across the broadsheet — helped establish the visual conventions every subsequent comic book inherited: the frozen moment, the recurring cast, the panel grid as narrative engine.