Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-09-14

Titled "Judge" Hooligan Sends Up Ma Katzenjammer, this nine-panel Sunday page follows Ma's arrest for cruelty to children — engineered by the boys themselves — before Mr. Hooligan collapses in a fit and chaos swallows the courtroom box he's been carted around in. Rudolph Dirks drew the Kids in a rounded, rubbery line inherited from Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*, with speech balloons carrying broad German-American dialect and physical comedy timed across panels like vaudeville beats. Launched in *The New York Journal* in 1897, *The Katzenjammer Kids* is among the earliest strips to use sequential panels and recurring characters as a weekly franchise — the structural DNA from which the comic book would directly descend.