Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 3 The Katzenjammer Kids

Katzenjammer Kids

After the Yellow Kid came the Katzenjammer Kids created by Rudolph Dirks in 1897 and later drawn by Harold Knerr for 35 years (1914 to 1949). It debuted December 12, 1897, in the American Humorist, the Sunday supplement of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The comic strip was inspired by Max and Moritz, a children’s story of the 1860s by German author Wilhelm Busch.

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 seven destructive pranks, the Katzenjammer Kids and the other characters still thrive.

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 sailor who acted as a surrogate father; and der Inspector, a long-bearded school official. Other characters included John Silver, a pirate sea captain; the Herring Brothers, John Silver’s three-man crew; and King Bongo, a primitive-living but sophisticated-acting black jungle monarch who ruled a tropical island.

As originally created, Mama’s husband was Papa Katzenjammer, her brother was the bungling sailor Heinie, and der Captain–introduced in 1902—was Heinie’s boss. After a short while, Papa was dropped from the strip without explanation, with der Captain taking over his function. By the 1940s, der Captain and Mama were often presented as a de facto couple.

The immediate Katzenjammer family usually spoke stereotypical German-accented English. When first introduced, der Captain and der Inspector did not, but within months adopted the accent as well. During World Wars I and II, when the United States was at war with Germany, the Katzenjammer family were temporarily presented as Dutch.

The defining theme of the strip was Hans and Fritz pranking der Captain, der Inspector, Mama, or all three, for which the boys were often spanked, but sometimes shifted the blame to others. Other stories involved der Captain taking the Katzenjammers on treasure hunts or cargo voyages, sometimes aided by or competing with John Silver. Still other stories involved King Bongo enlisting the Katzenjammers to run errands or go on missions related to his kingdom; in both strips, by the mid-1930s, the family lived on Bongo’s island— usually called Squee-Jee—and were readily at hand.

Knerr’s version of The Katzenjammer Kids introduced several major new characters in the 1930s. Miss Twiddle, a pompous tutor, and her brainy niece Lena came to stay permanently with the Katzenjammers in early 1936. Later in the year Twiddle’s ex-pupil, “boy prodigy” Rollo Rhubarb joined them. The ever- smug Rollo is always trying to outwit Hans and Fritz, but his cunning plans often backfire.

Notable features of the later strips, at both syndicates, included a more constructive relationship between the Captain and the boys, who sometimes bickered like friendly rivals rather than pranking each other outright. The King and his people, also in both strips, were now Polynesian rather than African.

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 2 The Yellow Kid

The Journey Towards Comic Books

Comic strips were becoming well established in newspapers but it would take nearly another three decades for the form to mature and begin to feature heroic characters that became the mainstay of the media. Along the way, many classic comic strips were produced.

Yellow Kid

The Yellow Kid (Mickey Dugan) was an American comic strip character that appeared from 1895 to 1898 in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Created and drawn by Richard F. Outcault, it was one of the first Sunday supplement comic strips in an American newspaper, although its graphical layout had already been thoroughly established in political and other, purely-for- entertainment cartoons. Outcault’s use of word balloons in the Yellow Kid influenced the basic appearance and use of balloons in subsequent newspaper comic strips and comic books.

Although a cartoon, Outcault’s work aimed its humor and social commentary at Pulitzer’s adult readership. The strip has been described as “... a turn-of-the-century theater of the city, in which class and racial tensions of the new urban, consumerist environment were acted out by a mischievous group of New York City kids from the wrong side of the tracks.”

The Yellow Kid was a bald, snaggle-toothed barefoot boy who wore an oversized yellow nightshirt and hung around in a slum alley typical of certain areas of squalor that existed in late 19th-century New York City. Hogan’s Alley was filled with equally odd characters, mostly other children. With a goofy grin, the Kid habitually spoke in a ragged, peculiar slang, which was printed on his shirt, a device meant to lampoon advertising billboards.

The Yellow Kid’s head was drawn wholly shaved as if having been recently ridden of lice, a common sight among children in New York’s tenement ghettos at the time. His nightshirt, a hand-me-down from an older sister, was white or pale blue in the first color strips.

Beginnings: Comic Strips, Part 1

Before there were comic books there were comic strips. The latter are basically a series of sequential art used to tell a joke or story. Humor has long been associated with these images and eventually helped to name them. A comical set of four sequential panels, or a comic strip.

Such art goes back to cave paintings and hieroglyphs. But modern strips began to take form in 15th century when Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, born Jeroen Anthonissen van Aken (c. 1450 - August 9, 1516), painted various scenes with sequential narratives. Many of his works depict sin and human moral failings. Bosch used images of demons, half-human animals and machines to evoke fear and confusion to portray the evil of man — images not unfamiliar in comic books today.

After that different people contributed to the form in different ways without knowing that was what they were doing. For example, from 1672-3, Francis Barlow, an English painter, etcher, and illustrator, drew The Cheese of Dutch Rebellion, a political cartoon which featured a text beneath the image, as well as speech balloons. Such early use of speech balloons was an important development.

William Hogarth, another English painter, published engravings of eight paintings in 1735, Rake’s Progress, combining text and art in a sequential fashion. He called his images, cartoons.

19th Century Advances

In the 19th century the comic strip form began to take shape more rapidly. William Heath, a British artist, helped found early caricature magazines. His The Glasgow Looking Glass was the first mass-produced publication to tell stories using illustrations and is regarded as the world’s first comic strip. It satirized the political and social life of Scotland in the 1820s.

In 1849, American artists James A. and Donald F. Read illustrated Journey To The Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags, which is the first picture story (or comic book) published in the United States. It tells the story of Jeremiah Saddlebags, an urban Northern dandy and “man of fashion,” who, looking for
a way to invest an inheritance, sets out towards California “by way of the Horn” (as in, by ship past Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America). The story relates his trials getting to San Francisco, and then his misadventures as he becomes involved in the California gold rush. He ends up one of the masses who did not get any “gold other than that of experience,” as art historian William Murrell put it in 1933 (A History of American Graphic Humor, 174).

In 1865, German painter, author, and caricaturist Wilhelm Busch created the strip Max and Moritz, about two trouble- making boys, which had a direct influence on the American comic strip. Max and Moritz was a series of seven severely moralistic tales in the vein of German children’s stories such as Struwwelpeter (“Shockheaded Peter”). In the story’s final act, the boys, after perpetrating some mischief, are tossed into a sack of grain, run through a mill, and consumed by a flock of geese (without anybody mourning their demise). Max and Moritz provided an inspiration for German immigrant Rudolph Dirks, who created the Katzenjammer Kids in 1897 – a strip starring two German-American boys visually modeled on Max and Moritz. Familiar comic-strip iconography such as stars for pain, sawing logs for snoring, speech balloons, and thought balloons originated in Dirks’ strip.

Ten years later, in 1875, Livingston Hopkins, an American- born cartoonist published Professor Tigwissel’s Burglar Alarm in The Daily Graphic, a New York newspaper known for daily illustrations. Professor Tigwissel was a one shot strip of 17 panels that filled the page and is one of the earliest newspaper comic strips and by the end of 1882, the American newspaper Grit began printing comic strips.

But strips at this time were one shots and solely for humor or political satire. Another ten years elapsed before they became recurring. The first to do so was Little Bears created by Jimmy Swinnerton, a cartoonist. The strip was one of the first American comic strips featuring talking animals and one of the first with recurring characters – the titular bears. The feature emerged from a series of spot illustrations of a bear cub that began appearing in The San Francisco Examiner starting October 14, 1893. The strip was launched as a regular feature on the children’s page starting June 2, 1895, and ran through June 7, 1897.

About the same time, 1893, Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper the New York World published the first color cartoon, The Possibilities of the Broadway Cable Car, in an American newspaper. The images, attributed to Walt McDougall, appeared on the cover of the World’s first color Sunday comic supplement, thus started the tradition of color comics on Sunday.

Introductions

I grew up reading comic books in the 1960s. It was the height of the Silver Age but that was lost on me. At the time, I had no idea that comic books were an accidental art form, the results of a slow evolution and the accumulation of many little changes that eventually became the standard way to tell a story visually with sequential art and text.

In this blog, I will be exploring how comic books evolved and then developed over time, looking at the characters in these books with a focus on superheroes because it is these characters that reflect our culture. They are a modern mythology for us to express our rage (the Hulk), our patriotism (Captain America) or our sense of being different (X-Men).

Comic books in the early years were awash with a mix of material: comic strip reprints, non-costumed detectives, spies, counterspies, and science-fiction tales set in the far future. Most of these have fallen away and return from time-to-time, while superheroes have remained and exploded more than ever since the mid-1980s. Since the birth of the Internet and the ability to publish digitally and directly to readers, the medium has transformed again and now boasts many types of the stories that reflect the audience that reads it. But superheroes remains the bulk of the stories told in this fashion. For this reason, I shall follow the evolution of the characters in comic books and explore the impact of the most lasting of heroes.

Comic books can trace their roots back to ancient mythologies of Egypt, Greece, Japan, and Mesoamerica. These tales reflect adventures of gods and heroes, much like the one we find in comics.

Eventually these tales disappeared as the Judeo-Christian religions swept across the world and were replaced with fairy tales. Gone are the gods and heroes in place of one-use characters and stories with a moral or purpose. Eventually recurring adventures of a single character return with the rise of detective stories in the 19th century. Next, pulp characters appear giving us a rich mythology of adventure once more.

Comic books borrowed from that rich tradition and expanded it until now these characters are engrained in our culture, our vocabulary, and our thinking.