Max und Moritz — Trick First (Plate 9 of 59)

A single page from Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz opens mid-narrative with a block of rhyming verse above a compact woodcut portrait of Widow Tibbets — a stout, bonneted woman rendered in Busch's characteristically economical cross-hatching, her expression set with grim dignity. The text introduces her as a keeper of poultry, listing eggs, roasted hen, and feather beds as the pleasures chickens provide — pleasures the two boys are about to exploit. Busch's method is central to comics history: verse and image share equal narrative load, neither redundant. This interplay of printed stanza and sequential vignette, published in Munich in 1865, directly influenced Rudolph Dirks when he created The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897, threading the DNA of German picture-stories straight into the American newspaper strip.