Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-06-01

Six panels follow Ma as she discovers two foundling babies on her doorstep, hauls them inside, and quickly discovers that Hans and Fritz — her actual sons — have been impersonating infants to win her sympathy, ending with Ma demanding to know why they won't 'goo-goo.' Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in the *New York Journal* in 1897, directly transplanting Wilhelm Busch's German picture-story tradition onto American newsprint. The strip's repeating cast, ruled panel borders, and speech balloons woven into the action helped standardize the visual grammar that newspaper Sunday pages — distributed nationally by Hearst and Pulitzer syndicates — passed wholesale into the first comic books of the 1930s, which were simply reprinted strips bound between covers.