Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-10-26

"How Uncle Heinie Takes His Bath" Nine panels follow the rotund Uncle Heinie through a catastrophic Saturday-night scrub in a galvanized washtub. Peeping children, a geyser of bathwater, a flooded floor, and a wife who decides to use the overflow as her own swim all pile disaster upon disaster in broad physical comedy. The strip's thick ink lines, exaggerated rubber-limbed figures, and speech balloons rendered in dialect German-English represent early newspaper Sunday-page cartooning at full gallop. *The Katzenjammer Kids*, launched by Rudolph Dirks in 1897 for Hearst's *New York Journal*, was among the first American strips to deploy a locked cast of recurring characters across sequential panels — the direct structural ancestor of the comic book format that would coalesce in the 1930s.