If you liked The Katzenjammer Kids
12 comics like The Katzenjammer Kids
Picked for the same feel: the genres they share with The Katzenjammer Kids (comedy), the same creators, and what readers keep together. Each opens where it is read legally.
Comics like The Katzenjammer Kids
Comedy1. Buster Brown
by Richard F. Outcault
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
A neatly dressed boy, his talking dog Tige, and a prank every Sunday — followed by a written resolution never to do it again, which never survives the week.
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Comedy2. Happy Hooligan
by Frederick Burr Opper
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
A tramp with a tin can for a hat tries to do somebody a kindness and is arrested for it in the last panel. Every week, for thirty years, the same good intention and the same policeman.
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Comedy3. Mutt and Jeff
by Bud Fisher
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
A tall schemer and a short optimist, running a small swindle a day and losing on it. It ran daily rather than on Sundays, which almost nothing did in 1907, and every daily strip since has inherited the habit.
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Comedy4. Toonerville Folks
by Fontaine Fox
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
A trolley that meets all the trains, a skipper with a beard, and a suburb of people who know each other far too well. The trolley became famous enough that real towns claimed to be the original.
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Comedy5. Frederick Burr Opper: Collected Cartoons
by Frederick Burr Opper
- Comedy (shared)
Single-panel work from the man who drew Happy Hooligan — magazine cartoons, political drawings and book illustration, from the years when the newspaper comic was still being invented around him.
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Comedy6. Foxy Grandpa
by Charles E. Schultze
- Comedy (shared)
Two boys plan a prank on the old man; the old man saw it coming and turns it round on them. The joke never varies, which was the point — readers came back to watch the grandfather win again.
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Comedy7. The Yellow Kid
by Richard F. Outcault
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
A bald child in a yellow nightshirt, standing in a tenement alley with words printed across the shirt instead of a speech balloon. Histories of the newspaper comic usually start here, and the colour of that shirt is where the phrase yellow journalism came from.
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Comedy8. Alphonse and Gaston
by Frederick Burr Opper
- Comedy (shared)
Two Frenchmen so determined to let each other go first that nothing ever gets done and the building burns down behind them. Their catchphrase outlived the strip by a century.
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Comedy9. Krazy Kat
by George Herriman
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
- Supernatural
A cat loves a mouse, the mouse throws a brick, and the cat reads the brick as a token of love. Thirty years of the same joke, told in a shifting desert landscape that changes between panels.
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Comedy10. Caran d'Ache: Collected Drawings
by Caran d'Ache
- Comedy (shared)
Wordless picture stories from Paris in the 1880s, told in strict panel sequence so the joke lands without a caption. He took his name from the Russian word for pencil, and he is the reason the story without words became a form.
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Comedy11. Reg'lar Fellers
by Gene Byrnes
- Comedy (shared)
Neighbourhood boys, spelled the way they talk, arguing about the rules of games they are inventing as they go. Small stakes taken entirely seriously, which is what being eight years old is like.
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Comedy12. Bringing Up Father
by George McManus
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
Jiggs came into money and would rather be eating corned beef with his old friends; Maggie intends them to be respectable and throws crockery about it. Drawn in a clean deco line that still looks modern beside the strips printed around it.
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