Katzenjammer Kids — 1908-06-14

Twelve panels follow Hans and Fritz — the Katzenjammer Kids — as they sneak a calf into a sleeping man's bed, triggering cascading mayhem: the calf rampages, the household erupts, and the boys flee into the night singing a nonsense college yell, "Razamazoo." Speech balloons carry thick dialect spelling; the page grid is confident and fast, each panel a tight cause-and-effect beat. Rudolph Dirks created the Kids in 1897 for Hearst's *New York Journal*, transplanting Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz* mischief-duo format into American newsprint. That Sunday-page format — recurring cast, sequential panels, integrated lettered dialogue — is the direct structural ancestor of the comic book, a format still two decades away from its commercial birth.