Katzenjammer Kids
| The Katzenjammer Kids | |
|---|---|
Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids (1901)
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| Author(s) | Rudolph Dirks, Harold Knerr, Doc Winner, Joe Musial, Mike Senich, Angelo DeCesare, Hy Eisman |
| Current status / schedule | Concluded, in reprints |
| Launch date | December 12, 1897 |
| End date | January 1, 2006 |
| Syndicate(s) | King Features Syndicate |
| Genre(s) | Humor |
The Katzenjammer Kids is an American comic strip created by the German immigrant Rudolph Dirks and drawn by Harold H. Knerr for 37 years (1912 to 1949). It debuted December 12, 1897 in the American Humorist, the Sunday supplement of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Dirks was the first cartoonist to express dialogue in comic characters through the use of speech balloons.
After a series of legal battles between 1912 and 1914, Dirks left the Hearst organization and began a new strip, first titled Hans and Fritz and then The Captain and the Kids. It featured the same characters seen in The Katzenjammer Kids, which was continued by Knerr. The two separate versions of the strip competed with each other until 1979, when The Captain and the Kids ended its six-decade run. The Katzenjammer Kids is still distributed by King Features, making it the oldest comic strip still in syndication and the longest-running ever.
The Katzenjammer Kids was inspired by Max and Moritz, a children's story of the 1860s by German author Wilhelm Busch. The Katzenjammer Kids (three brothers in the first strip but soon reduced to two) featured Hans and Fritz, twins who rebelled against authority, particularly in the form of their mother, Mama; der Captain, a shipwrecked sailor who acted as a surrogate father; and der Inspector, an official from the school system. Other characters included John Silver, a pirate sea captain and his crew, and King Bongo, a primitive-living but sophisticated-acting black jungle monarch who ruled a tropical island. Several of the characters spoke in stereotypical German-accented English. The main plot of the strip was Hans and Fritz would pull a prank or trick on one of the adults which resulted in their being hunted down and given a spanking in the end panel. Katzenjammer translates literally as the wailing of cats (i.e. "caterwaul") but is used to mean contrition after a failed endeavor or hangover in German (and, in the latter sense, in English too). Whereas Max & Moritz were grotesquely but comically put to death after 7 destructive pranks, the Katzenjammer Kids and the other characters still thrive.
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