Katzenjammer Kids — 1909-09-26

Twelve panels follow the Kids and the Captain through a Filipino village where a planned dog feast goes spectacularly sideways. The Captain corrals dogs, is mauled by pigs, brawls with a red-haired islander, and ends up netted on a beach while the dogs escape unharmed. Rudolf Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897, directly modeling it on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. Its innovations — sequential panels of uniform size, integrated speech balloons, a cast of recurring characters whose personalities drive every strip — became the structural DNA of American comics. These Sunday pages, printed in color broadsheets, were the direct ancestors of the comic book format that would emerge in the 1930s when publishers began reprinting and then originating such strips in pamphlet form.