The Katzenjammer Kids Get a New Easter Suit

Eight panels follow Hans and Fritz, the incorrigible Katzenjammer twins, through a single sustained gag: dragged into stiff Easter finery they despise, the boys scheme, wreak havoc, and reduce the adult authority figures—the Captain and companions Alphonse and Gaston—to battered chaos. Speech balloons carry the strip's signature broken-dialect comedy; the panel borders, sequential action, and recurring cast are all structural inventions this strip helped fix into the language of comics. Rudolf Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in *The New York Journal* in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. Those Sunday pages—printed broadsheets folded once—are the direct ancestors of the comic book format that would emerge by the 1930s.