Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-03-29

Nine panels follow the Captain's April Fool scheme: a boutonniere rigged to spray water. He lures Hans close, the jet misfires, soaking the Captain himself; the boys then demonstrate the trick properly, triggering a spectacular explosion in panel eight that flattens everyone. The Captain's wounded dignity in the final panel — sputtering at the laughing crowd — is the real punchline. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in *The New York Journal* in 1897, directly inspired by Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. It is among the earliest strips to use sequential panels and speech balloons as a stable visual system — conventions that Sunday newspaper pages exported worldwide and that comic books would later inherit wholesale.