Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-01-04

Eight panels follow Mrs. Katzenjammer, Uncle Happy, and the two mischievous boys through a winter snowball scheme. The kids secretly pack snowballs while Uncle Happy, dressed as a snowman, plans to startle them — only to be pelted himself when the ruse backfires. Speech balloons render the characters' thick dialect phonetically; pantomime action carries the slapstick across each numbered panel. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in the *New York Journal* in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. The strip's repeating cast, sequential panels, and integrated balloon-text helped codify conventions that Sunday newspaper pages exported worldwide — the same pages that, collected and stapled decades later, became the first comic books.