Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-10-05

"Foxy Ma Katzenjammer Gets a Fall" runs nine panels across three tiers. In the opening tier, one of the boys threatens to stuff a cat inside a cushion; in the middle tier, Ma herself sits on the cushion and bursts it; the final tier ends with her crashing to the floor in a spray of stuffing while the boys cheer. The linework is loose and kinetic — exaggerated round bodies, expressive mouths, speed lines on the fall. Speech balloons carry the household's thick immigrant dialect in hand-lettered capitals. *The Katzenjammer Kids*, launched by Rudolph Dirks in 1897, was among the first strips to systematize sequential panels and recurring characters into a reliable weekly grammar — the direct structural ancestor of the comic book page.