Katzenjammer Kids — 1913-03-02

Twelve panels follow Hans and Fritz as they torment a pompous sentry in a striped guardhouse, dousing him with water and knocking over his post, until a large Black royal guardsman catches them and delivers the promised spanking. Rudolf Dirks launched *The Katzenjammer Kids* in *The New York Journal* in 1897, directly modeling his mischievous German-immigrant twins on Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz*. The strip's regularized grid of panels, speech balloons integrated into the image plane, and consistent recurring cast became foundational conventions for every comic page that followed. When Dirks left Hearst, a court ruling allowed both him and replacement artist Harold Knerr to draw the same characters simultaneously — an early legal precedent defining comics as intellectual property.