Katzenjammer Kids — 1901-01-20

Nine panels follow Hans and Fritz after kidnappers post a ransom note demanding two cents—then discover the boys are more trouble than any reward. The mother (Mama), built like a cannonball in a polka-dot dress, tracks the culprits across snow-covered ground by their footprints, catches them, and sends them rolling. Final panel: the deflated kidnappers admit they should have been paid *to* return the kids. Dirks drew the Katzenjammer Kids from 1897, directly adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. His strip standardized the sequential panel grid, the speech balloon anchored to a speaker, and the recurring-cast Sunday page—tools every cartoonist since has inherited.