Katzenjammer Kids — 1904-01-10

Nine numbered panels follow Mrs. Katzenjammer and the rotund Uncle Heinie through a telephone prank: the Captain phones to complain that the doughnuts he ate at their house were awful; Mrs. Katzenjammer retaliates by calling Heinie a 'chump'; Hans and Fritz eavesdrop and collapse laughing; Heinie, suspecting a caller, hears only silence. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in the *New York Journal* in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. The strip pioneered the conventions now taken for granted — sequential numbered panels, speech balloons anchored to speakers, a stable cast returning week after week — conventions that American Sunday supplements exported worldwide and that would migrate, panel by panel, into the first comic books of the 1930s.