Hans and Fritz Were Spanked!

This Sunday strip from the Omaha Daily Bee follows Hans and Fritz, the mischievous Katzenjammer Kids whose antics made them among the first recurring comic characters in American newspapers. The strip's visual language—sequential panels, speech balloons, and slapstick humor built on escalating chaos—helped establish the grammar of comics. Here, the boys' destructive pranks culminate in spankings from their exasperated elders. The strip's German immigrant characters, rendered with period ethnic caricature, reflect early 20th-century newspaper comics' reliance on working-class and immigrant comedy. These Sunday pages, appearing in hundreds of newspapers nationwide, were the direct precursor to the comic books that would emerge two decades later.