Katzenjammer Kids — 1913-03-16

Twelve numbered panels follow Uncle Heinie through his abdication as king of a cannibal island and his chaotic return home. He dispatches a messenger to parliament, survives a coconut bombardment at the palace gate, delivers a farewell speech to his assembled subjects, and finally rows away in relief. The gags run on fractured German-immigrant dialect rendered phonetically in speech balloons—"dot's der stuff, Heinie!"—while physical chaos escalates panel by panel in the strip's signature style. Launched by Rudolph Dirks in the *New York Journal* in 1897, *The Katzenjammer Kids* is among the earliest strips to use sequential numbered panels and recurring characters systematically, making the Sunday page format a direct ancestor of the comic book as a discrete narrative form.