Dirks's Bad Boys

Eluding South Sea cannibals who are bent on turning brats into Bratwurst, roly-poly Hans and Fritz last week reacted with their usual aplomb. "Vot's mit diss nutty island?" demands black-haired Hans in righteous indignation. Just in time, an utter stranger saves the brothers from certain ingestion. "Only for you," towheaded Fritz thanks their rescuer, "ve vos on der half-shell." And so, as it has since their birth 60 years ago, another bit of nonsense fell off the pen of Cartoonist Rudolph Dirks to save the world's most durable delinquents of the funny page for more low jinks next week.

At 79, Rudolph Dirks is the most tenacious cartoonist in the U.S., and at 60 his pen children, the Katzenjammer Kids, are the oldest inhabitants of the U.S. comic strips.

Over the years, the Teutonic twins have not only prevailed against cannibals, Der Captain and myriad other adult oppressors, but have survived, as well, newspaper wars, two World Wars against Germany and the Pianola-to-TV revolution in U.S. taste. Today the jug-eared, saucer-eyed hellions mangle their foes and the language with the same sadistic glee that tickled readers' ribs in 1897.*Child psychologists and teachers these days deplore their influence; children love them.

Though the Kids, who appear only in Sunday comic pages, have fallen behind such seven-days-a-week upstarts as Li'l Abner (820 daily and Sunday newspapers) and Blondie (1,200), their anarchistic appeal is still powerful enough to support their antics in two rival strips: The Katzenjammer Kids, which was Cartoonist Dirks's original strip, and The Captain and the Kids, the strip he began after losing The Kids in 1913. Combined, they appear in 400 U.S. newspapers with a total circulation of some 60 million, and translated into nearly a dozen foreign languages (with the Teutonicisms strained out), have other fans from Sarajevo to San Salvador.

Hangover Habit. Hans and Fritz were born of the great circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst; Pulitzer's New York Sunday World sired the first colored U.S. comic 61 years ago last week. Its star, a slangy, yellow-nightgowned infant who achieved fame as The Yellow Kid,/- was promptly snatched by Hearst for the Sunday Journal's eight-page color supplement. A year later, the Journal dragooned 19-year-old Staff Artist Dirks into composing a cartoon based on German Artist Wilhelm Busch's venerable Max und Moritz drawings.

German-born Rudolph Dirks was the first U.S. cartoonist to develop a plot with a series of consecutive panels and a permanent cast of characters, the first to enclose all his dialogue in balloons. His Kids, christened Katzenjammer (German slang for hangover) by a Journal editor, became a classic over Dirks's protests. "People will get sick of this stuff," he insisted. But the kids caught on, soon gathered the supporting cast that still appears in both strips: long-suffering Mama; Der Inspector, a white-bearded truant officer; and Der Captain, a seafaring disciplinarian ("Spare der rod und spoil der brat"), who is Mama's star boarder and the pranksters' perennial victim.

TNT & Sympathy. With time out for the Spanish-American War (he was a corporal), a 1912 trip to Europe and a five-year fling at retirement that ended in 1937, Rudy Dirks has been chronicling the Kids ever since. The great Katzenjammer feud broke out in 1913, when the Journal sued to prevent Artist Dirks from going over to Pulitzer's World. After a Kidless year in court, the Journal won all rights to the Katzenjammer Kids title and hired the late Harold (Dinglehoofer und His Dog) Knerr to draw the strip. Dirks took the Katzies, as he calls them, to the World and started a new comic strip called Hans and Fritz. To appease anti-German sentiment in World War I, he changed the name to The Captain and the Kids (Knerr, who rechristened his wards The Shenanigan Kids for the duration, even had the kids go to court to swear that they hailed from The Netherlands).

Assisted by his son, Yaleman John Dirks, 39, spry Rudy Dirks now works two days a week to turn out The Captain, spends the rest of his time painting landscapes and portraits in oils. The Katenjammers are drawn by Joe Musial. The Captain runs in fewer than 100 newspapers.v. The Katzenjammers' 300 (including Hearst's New York Sunday Journal-American). Dirks Sr. and Jr. argue, nevertheless, that the original Kids, as portrayed in The Captain, are the more "sympathetic" of the two. Explains John: "When the Kids set off 8,000 tons of TNT under Der Captain, they only want to singe him a little. When they're punished in an adult, unknowing way, they reciprocate. But most of the provocation comes from adults." In an age that regards delinquents as more sinned against than sinning, Dirks's mixed-up Kids have never been better understood.

*One of their early fans: Artist Pablo Picasso. /- And gave to that era of sensationalism the term yellow journalism.

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