The Katzenjammer Kids — The Sun (New York), April 14, 1918

This Sunday page from *The Sun* (New York) reproduces The Katzenjammer Kids, the strip Rudolf Dirks launched in *The New York Journal* in 1897, modeling his mischievous twin brothers Hans and Fritz on Wilhelm Busch's German picture-story *Max und Moritz*. By 1918 the strip had already survived a landmark legal battle splitting Dirks from Hearst, leaving two parallel versions running simultaneously in competing papers. The Kids' anarchic multi-panel sequences — pratfalls visited on the Captain and the Inspector, speech balloons thick with comic-German dialect, cause-and-effect gag chains running left to right across the broadsheet — helped establish the visual conventions every subsequent comic book inherited: the frozen moment, the recurring cast, the panel grid as narrative engine.