Katzenjammer Kids — 1902-12-21

Six panels follow the Captain's doomed effort to secure Mrs. Katzenjammer's Christmas tree. He lashes it upright with rope and pulley while Hans and Fritz look on; one tug brings the whole arrangement crashing down in a cloud of debris and stars, flattening everyone. Dirks draws in the broad, rubbery style he inherited from Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*: thick outlines, pantomimed shock, speech balloons carrying fractured German-American dialect. Launched in the *New York Journal* in 1897, *The Katzenjammer Kids* was among the first strips to use recurring characters across weekly installments — making it a direct ancestor of the comic book format that would collect such pages by the 1930s. The strip's consistent cast, sequential panels, and balloon dialogue became the template every subsequent cartoonist learned from.