From the exhibition
Order in the Court!
· October 25, 1914
R. Dirks's Sunday strip follows the Captain and his mischievous children through a courtroom chaos sequence. A goat disrupts legal proceedings, triggering slapstick across nine panels. The strip demonstrates early comics' mastery of sequential narrative: panel borders guide the eye, speech balloons anchor dialogue, and repetition of characters and setting build momentum. Newspapers syndicated such strips nationally, making them the primary vehicle for visual storytelling before comic books existed. Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids*, which spawned this derivative series, established the template—recurring cast, domestic humor, anarchic energy—that shaped American comics for decades.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
