The Katzenjammer Kids

Rudolph Dirks's The Katzenjammer Kids is one of the most important strips in comics history — and, remarkably, a version of it ran for more than a century. Created for Hearst's Sunday supplement, it followed Hans and Fritz, two incorrigible boys whose pranks tormented their long-suffering elders. Dirks adapted the mayhem from Max und Moritz, the illustrated tales of German humorist Wilhelm Busch, translating that mischief into a weekly American feature.

Its significance is structural. More consistently than almost anything before it, the Katzenjammer Kids used sequences of panels to tell a story in time, and put words in speech balloons to let characters talk on the page. These devices — sequential panels and the balloon — became the load-bearing grammar of the comic strip, and Dirks helped make them standard rather than experimental.

The strip's later history reads like a parable of the medium's growing value: a famous legal fight over ownership let the feature continue under a new artist while Dirks drew his own near-identical version elsewhere, so two rival 'Katzenjammer' families ran for years. That anyone would go to court over cartoon children shows just how much comics had come to be worth.