Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-11-29

Six panels follow Mamma Katzenjammer interviewing a new hired girl — a broad, powerful woman who boasts she eats flat-irons for breakfast. The comedy escalates when she gets stuck in a doorframe, blindly thrashes the furniture, and knocks Heinie flat; in the final panel she insists she needs no help while sitting on the dazed boy. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897 for Hearst's *New York Journal*, drawing directly on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. Dirks standardized the numbered panel sequence and expressive speech balloons that would become universal visual syntax. These Hearst Sunday pages — printed in full color, distributed nationally — are the direct ancestor of the comic book format that emerged in the 1930s when such strips were simply collected and stapled.