Katzenjammer Kids — "The Thrilling Rescue of Ma and Uncle Heinie"

Six panels follow the extended Katzenjammer family on a log raft navigating river rapids. Uncle Heinie plays captain, barking nautical commands in comic-German dialect; Ma, round and unflappable, clings to the runaway raft as it plunges over a waterfall. Hans and Fritz — the strip's twin-boy protagonists — arrive by rowboat to haul the waterlogged adults to safety, with a running gag about a "shark" at someone's foot. Rudolf Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in *The New York Journal* in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. Its consistent cast, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons helped standardize the visual grammar that Sunday newspaper comics pages — precursors to the comic book — would carry into the twentieth century.