Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-07-06

Six panels follow Hans and Fritz as they con a visiting doctor into prescribing pies, candy, and circus trips rather than vaccinations — the boys feign illness, flatter shamelessly, and escape the needle by turning the exam into chaos. Dirks draws in a rubbery, high-contrast pen style: bulbous figures, exaggerated motion lines, curtained parlor interiors. Speech balloons carry the characters' thick German-dialect dialogue, their broken English a running comic engine. Rudolf Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897, directly adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. With its fixed cast, sequential panels, and integrated word-and-image storytelling, the strip helped establish the formal grammar that Sunday newspaper pages exported worldwide — and that would eventually migrate, panel by panel, into the comic book itself.