Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-09-21

Nine panels follow Hans and Fritz as they lure a visitor called "Mr. Happy" into sitting on a booby-trapped table, triggering a cascade of slapstick catastrophes that ends with a policeman hauling the boys away while Mamma looks on. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897 for Hearst's *New York Journal*, modelling the strip on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. It is among the earliest strips to codify the tools every cartoonist still uses: sequential numbered panels, speech balloons integrated into the drawing, and a fixed cast whose personalities drive recurring gags. These Sunday pages — printed in color rotogravure for mass circulation — are the direct ancestor of the comic book format that would emerge in the 1930s.