Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-12-06

Nine panels track Hans and Fritz through a Christmas Eve ambush: the boys climb to the roof, drop through the chimney, and wallop a figure they mistake for Santa — who turns out to be the Captain, their perpetual target, arriving in a fur coat. Rudolf Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897, directly adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz* for American newsprint. The strip is among the earliest to lock in the visual conventions that would define comics: sequential numbered panels, integrated speech balloons, and a fixed cast whose personalities reset each week. These Sunday pages — printed in color broadsheets and later collected into pamphlets — form the direct material ancestor of the comic book format itself.