An old
comic strip, created in 1897 by
Rudolph Dirks. According to some
comics historians, this is actually the first true comic strip, not
Richard F. Outcault's "
Yellow Kid"; while "The Yellow Kid" appeared first, "
Katzenjammer" was the first to appear in a
strip format -- a sequence of
panels that tell a
story. This comic was also one of the first to use the
word balloon.
The strip focused on
Hans and
Fritz, two
mischievous little
German boys who enjoyed playing
destructive pranks on their
elders, including
Mama, the
Captain, and the
Inspector, who was a
truant officer. All the characters spoke in thick
Germanic accents and, aside from Hans and Fritz, were
dumb as posts. But the boys'
cunning rarely did them much good; almost every strip ended with the boys getting an enthusiastic
paddling.
After taking a break to fight in the
Spanish-American War, Dirks returned to the strip for over a decade. In 1912, he decided to take another break so he could
travel around the world and
paint, but
William Randolph Hearst, who owned the feature, decided to keep the comic going with new
cartoonists. When Dirks returned, Hearst wouldn't hire him back, and Dirks
sued. The
judge allowed Hearst to keep the feature, but gave Dirks permission to use the same
characters elsewhere, as long as he used a different
title for the cartoon, so Dirks started a new strip, called "
The Captain and the Kids" for the rival Pulitzer papers in 1914.
As the years passed, the Kids'
ethnicity was gradually de-emphasized (after they were suddenly turned
Dutch during
World War I). The characters appeared in everything from
silent cartoons to
stage plays to
Big Little Books. Original strips were published until 2006, but reprints of the strip is still being published. At more than a
century in the
funny pages, that makes it far and away the longest-running comic strip in the world...