Katzenjammer Kids — 1909-07-11

Twelve panels titled *All Vot Glitters Ain't Sometimes Gold!* follow the Kids, the Captain, and Mama Katzenjammer through a gold-rush scheme gone wrong: a con man sells them gold paint, they ride out on a mule, stake a claim, haul nuggets to an assay office, and discover the whole pile is painted rocks. Rudolf Dirks, who launched the strip in 1897 modelling it on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*, refined here the visual grammar that defined Sunday pages: sequential numbered panels, speech balloons carrying dialect, and slapstick choreographed across a full broadsheet color page. These Sunday supplements — produced cheaply to sell papers — were the direct material ancestor of the comic book, which simply repackaged and reprinted them beginning in the 1930s.