Katzenjammer Kids — 1913-02-16

"The Flower of the Army!" Twelve panels follow the Captain's new royal guard, Umji, assigned by King Heinie to protect the perpetually napping Captain. The strip's engine is simple: Umji, disciplined and spear-carrying, discovers his charge asleep, prods him awake repeatedly, and is ultimately rebuffed and dismissed. Rudolph Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in 1897 for Hearst's *New York Journal*, directly adapting Wilhelm Busch's German picture-story *Max und Moritz*. The strip codified sequential panel grids, integrated speech balloons, and established recurring cast comedy as the Sunday page's dominant form — conventions every subsequent comic book inherited wholesale. By 1913 the strip was already sixteen years old and globally syndicated, its visual grammar fully mature.