The Katzenjammer Kids — St. Louis Republic, September 21, 1902

Nine numbered panels follow Hans and Fritz, the incorrigible Katzenjammer twins, as they set up an elaborate surprise for Mrs. Katzenjammer — hiding under a draped table, springing out, and reducing the household to chaotic slapstick. The Captain and Der Inspector appear in later panels, absorbing the inevitable retribution. Rudolf Dirks drew the strip in a loose, energetic line inherited directly from Wilhelm Busch's *Max und Moritz* (1865), the picture-story that was its explicit model. Launched in the *New York Journal* in 1897, *The Katzenjammer Kids* is among the earliest strips to use sequential numbered panels and speech balloons as a consistent visual system — the same grammar that Sunday newspaper pages would export into the first comic books decades later.