Katzenjammer Kids — 1903-12-27

Six panels follow the Captain's disastrous debut as a gymnasium instructor. He demonstrates "lightness" by crashing off a pommel horse, "quickness" by cartwheeling into the equipment, and "gracefulness" by destroying the apparatus entirely — while Hans and Fritz watch with gleeful detachment. The phonetic German-immigrant dialect (*"Dot's quickness!"*) is integral to the humor. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897 for the Hearst syndicate, directly adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. It is among the earliest strips to use sequential panels, speech balloons, and a fixed cast of recurring characters — the very conventions that Sunday newspaper pages exported worldwide and that early comic book anthologists would repackage, making the Sunday page the direct ancestor of the comic book medium itself.