Katzenjammer Kids — "How to Cook Poi!"

Twelve packed color panels follow the Captain, Mama, Hans, Fritz, and a Hawaiian prince through a poi-cooking misadventure that ends in volcanic chaos. The gags run on slapstick escalation: a rolling free-poi cart triggers a mob, the dish proves scorchingly inedible, and a volcano supplies the punchline. Rudolph Dirks created *The Katzenjammer Kids* for Hearst papers in 1897, directly modeling it on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. His strip codified the Sunday page's visual grammar — sequential numbered panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast, and color as narrative tool — making it a direct ancestor of the comic book format that would coalesce by the 1930s. This page is among the oldest continuously running comic strips still identifiable today.