Katzenjammer Kids — 1905-12-17

Six panels, black-and-white broadsheet format. Hans and Fritz, the incorrigible Katzenjammer twins, convince their classmates that an explosion at a dynamite factory should excuse everyone from school — freeing the gang to attend the Great Winter Circus. The Captain's imposing silhouette confronts them; retribution looms in the final panel. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897 for Hearst, directly adapting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. His innovations — regularized panel grids, integrated speech balloons, fixed recurring characters — gave newspaper comics the visual grammar that Sunday supplements then exported into the first collected comic books of the 1910s–20s. This strip is that lineage made visible.