Katzenjammer Kids — St. Valentine's Day with the Katzenjammer Household

Nine panels follow Hans and Fritz as they forge prank valentines, signing them from 'Happy Hooligan' and delivering chaos across the Katzenjammer household. Characters receive insulting cards, misread authorship spirals into a street brawl, and the final panels collapse into a chorus of apologies and recriminations. Rudolf Dirks drew the Kids in a loose, kinetic ink style — crowded speech balloons, slapstick staging, repeated characters tracked across a full broadsheet page. Launched in 1897 for the *New York Journal*, the strip was among the first to use sequential panels with integrated dialogue balloons as a sustained weekly narrative, establishing conventions — the running cast, the escalating gag, the panel grid — that American comic books would inherit wholesale four decades later.