Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-04-05

Eight panels follow Uncle Heinie's kitchen-science lecture on volcanoes: he uses a globe as his prop, the twins Hans and Fritz listen with feigned attention, and the gag escalates predictably when the globe explodes in Heinie's face. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in the *New York Journal* in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz* into a recurring-cast Sunday page — one of the first strips to deploy consistent characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons as a stable visual system. That grammar, refined across Hearst's Sunday color supplements throughout the 1900s, gave future comic-book editors their page architecture ready-made.