The Katzenjammer Kids, December 19, 1920

The Katzenjammer Kids, December 19, 1920

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I posted about the Katzenjammer Kids last year when I shared a classic 1905 Rudolph Dirks strip. Dirks was the original creator of the Katzies, but this one is drawn by the replacement artist Harold Knerr. Knerr drew the strip for the Hearst papers after Dirks left to work for the rival Pulitzer papers. Dirks wanted to take entire strip with him, but the courts ruled that he couldn't use the same title. So, Knerr drew The Katzenjammer Kids for Hearst, and Dirks used the same characters under a new title, The Captain and the Kids. That meant there were two versions of the same strip drawn by two different artists running in different newspapers at the same time! The strip is already the longest running comic strip ever, but this means that there are more strips in the Katzenjammer archive than normally would be.

If you pay close attention, you can tell the difference in the art between Dirks and Knerr, but the casual observer probably wouldn't be able to. The humor is about the same, though. This particular one has Hans and Fritz getting into the usual trouble, and the captain getting himself into more trouble as a result. I'm not really sure why they're shooting a movie with Santa Claus, a monkey, and a lion, though. I guess I'd have to see the finished product to understand.