Katzenjammer Kids

Eight panels track a classic bedtime dispute: Hans and Fritz lie in bed trading pinches; their mother storms in repeatedly demanding confessions; denials escalate into a full bed-collapse brawl, ending with the Captain wielding a slipper while 'Did!' and 'Didn't!' fly across the wreckage. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in the *New York Journal* in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz* into sequential panels with speech balloons — tools that would define American comics. Sunday pages like this one, with their recurring cast, timed punchlines, and grid of action, gave future comic-book artists the visual grammar they built an industry on. The strip remains one of the longest-running in newspaper history.