Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-01-18

Six panels follow Hans and Fritz, the incorrigible Katzenjammer twins, as they impersonate telegram messenger boys to retrieve the Captain's old hat and coat while he is away on a cruise. The gag escalates from domestic conspiracy to chaotic confrontation, with the Captain's stout wife and her companions reacting in escalating alarm. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897 for the New York Journal, adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. His strip refined the sequential-panel format, standardized speech balloons, and established recurring characters across weekly installments — structural conventions that Sunday newspaper pages exported directly into the first comic books of the 1930s, which were initially reprints of exactly these pages.