Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-04-26

A Song! — By the Katzenjammer Kids unfolds across six panels: Mama bullies Hans and Fritz into performing a duet; an older gentleman recruits them for a chorus; they belt out a tune about a mama's doughnuts so heavy they sink; and the old woman herself arrives, unamused. Rudolf Dirks launched the strip in *The New York Journal* in 1897, drawing directly on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. His innovations — regularized rectangular panels, integrated speech balloons, a cast with fixed visual identities returning week after week — gave American newspaper comics their enduring grammar. These Sunday pages, reproduced and bundled, became the direct precursor of the comic book format publishers would formalize in the 1930s.