Hello Fans,
Apropos of all the calendar talk lately, I’ve realized that, a little after noon today, it will be 12:12 on 12/12/12. Is there something cosmic about that? I know the numbers won’t line up like that again until 1/1/01, eighty-nine years from now. So if it means something, now’s the time.
More importantly, today marks another year for the durable KATZENJAMMER KIDS, as the world’s oldest comic grows another year.
One hundred and fifteen years ago, Rudolph Dirks contributed the strip below to the early Hearst Sunday comic section in the New York Journal. The kids, and even the art style, is inspired by Wilhelm Busch’s classic 19th century children’s classic, MAX UND MORITZ. In the first so many entries, there were three Katzenjammer kids. They also had a father who soon disappeared, and for several years, rotten little Hans and Fritz exclusively pulled pranks on Mamma. The addition of Der Captain in 1902, and the Inspector in 1905, changed the focus of their wrath and launched a century of laughs and destruction.
Much like Busch’s MAX UND MORITZ, these three KATZENJAMMER KIDS easily concoct an ingenious revenge on misbehaving adults. (Comic courtesy of Cole Johnson).
The “Katzies” are the only strip stars to exist in three different centuries, and perhaps they can make it to a fourth. When that happens, I’ll keep you posted.
Yours,
Der Archivist
Wow! I had long known that the Kids were “inspired” by “Max and Moritz”, but I had no idea how blatant it was at the start. I would have sworn this strip was drawn by Busch!
[...] In the spring of 1913, the KATZENJAMMER KIDS was the pride of Hearst newspapers and the top comic strip in the land. But all was not well concerning the strip’s cartoonist, Rudolph Dirks. It seems Dirks felt that he could take time off from his drawing board whenever he wanted, but the syndicate didn’t agree. He didn’t see it their way, took an unauthorized vacation and was fired. Unfortunately, this brought the beloved strip to a halt because Dirks contended that he, not William Randolph Hearst, actually owned the characters. Dirks had created them and had been authoring the Katzenjammer Kids’ adventures for the past fifteen years, an impressive feat in those early days of comics. See the first episode here. [...]