Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-03-08

Six panels track a slapstick arc: the Captain, bent over a sawhorse plank, warns Hans and Fritz against monkey business. The boys and their dog Bow ignore him, yanking the plank and sending the Captain crashing to the floor. Mama appears to administer punishment — though in the final panel both boys wail 'Poor dear Fritzy!' and 'Poor dear Hansy!' with self-pitying symmetry. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897 for Hearst's *New York Journal*, directly modeling the strip on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. Dirks codified the recurring-cast Sunday page and refined the speech balloon into standard comics grammar — visual conventions every subsequent cartoonist inherited. The strip's unbroken run makes it among the longest in American newspaper history.