Katzenjammer Kids — The New Year's Costume Ball

Six panels follow Hans, Fritz, and their cohort as they grease the grand staircase with axle grease before a midnight costume ball, causing the elaborately dressed Mrs. Katzenjammer and her guests to slide, tumble, and crash in escalating chaos — the grandfather clock ticking toward midnight in each panel like a countdown fuse. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897, directly inspired by Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*, and pioneered the stable visual conventions American comics would carry forward: sequential panels of fixed size, integrated speech balloons, and slapstick built across a page rather than a single image. These Sunday full-color pages — distributed by Hearst's syndicate to millions of readers — are the direct ancestor of the comic book format.