Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-10-19

Ma Katzenjammer Scrubs the Ship's Side runs six panels in the compact Sunday-page format Rudolph Dirks pioneered when he launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897. Here Ma, suspended over the ocean on a rope cradle, scrubs the hull while Hans and Fritz—the incorrigible Kids—threaten to cut her loose unless she promises bicycles, cameras, knives, guns, ice cream, and apple dumplings. She swears to everything; they cut the rope anyway. The strip's engine is the recurring broken promise, the slapstick fall, the watery splash. Dirks borrowed the scenario from Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz* but fused it with speech balloons and sequential panels into a grammar that American Sunday supplements would export worldwide—the direct ancestor of the comic book page.