Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-07-27

Six panels follow Hans and Fritz—here disguised as "Maggie and Lena, orphan twins"—conning a large, good-natured woman out of her pie, then scampering off. The strip runs top-to-bottom in two tiers: the boys dress in girls' clothes, approach the woman with a sob story, accept her generosity with exaggerated gratitude, and bolt the moment the door closes. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897 for the New York Journal, directly modeling it on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. The strip pioneered recurring characters, sequential panels with consistent settings, and integrated speech balloons—formal devices that migrated wholesale into the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s. Dirks's brisk ink linework and broad physical comedy set a template American cartoonists followed for decades.