Katzenjammer Kids — 1905-02-26

Six panels follow a hidden man — apparently one of the Kids or the Captain — concealed behind a bedroom wall, reaching through to mimic Mamma Katzenjammer's mirror reflection. She preens and poses; the impersonator mugs back. When she finally pokes the glass she connects with flesh, the hidden figure yelps 'OUCH,' and the ruse collapses in slapstick fury. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in the *New York Journal* in 1897, adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz* into a recurring-cast strip with sequential panels and integrated speech balloons — the very conventions newspaper Sunday pages were then formalizing into what would become the comic book form. The strip's physical comedy and Germanic dialect dialogue proved immediately influential on every artist who followed.