From the exhibition
Katzenjammer Kids — 1910-01-02
· January 2, 1910 · Washington Post Comic Section
Twelve panels follow the arrival of Cousin Otto from Germany aboard a steamship, where Captain and the boys Fritz and Hans greet him with immediate mischief. Otto, round-faced and boisterous, survives a hazing by the kids, trades chaos in the cabin, and ends the strip suspended upside-down, dripping jam. The thick brushwork, dense cross-hatching, and crowded speech balloons rendered in comic-German dialect are signature Katzenjammer — the strip Rudolf Dirks launched in 1897, directly modeled on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. Sunday pages like this one, syndicated nationally and printed in full color on broadsheet supplements, established recurring characters, sequential panel grids, and integrated speech balloons as the foundational grammar every comic book artist would inherit.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
