Katzenjammer Kids — Delia and Maggie

Six panels follow Hans and Fritz as they dress in girls' clothing, crash a church-fair tea committee hosted by Mama Katzenjammer, and filch doughnuts — chaos landing, as always, on every adult in range. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in the *New York Journal* in 1897, transplanting Wilhelm Busch's Max und Moritz into a format that codified the modern comic strip: numbered panels read left-to-right, speech balloons anchored to individual speakers, and a cast whose personalities reset each week. Sunday pages like this one — printed in color broadsheets, later bound into pamphlet reprints — form the direct ancestor of the comic book. Dirks's thick brushwork and pratfall timing set a template that shaped Herriman, Segar, and every gag strip that followed.