Comics-Katzenjammer Kids TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; this prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take this travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission needed to leave the U.S. 

Travel bug photos in the logs are appreciated.  I will re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

My youth was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Drawing from that period, this is one of a series of travel bugs made to commemorate favorite characters from comic books, comic strips, movie cartoons, B-movies and animated feature-length movies.  Some of the characters had only a brief existence, some survived as radio and early TV programs and some have been digitally-modernized into some of the blockbuster movies of today.  There were many other characters, but these are the ones on which I was willing to spend my dimes (comic books) and quarters (movie and popcorn).  However, I didn’t pay for the daily comic strips or Sunday funnies that came with the newspaper.

The Katzenjammer Kids is an American comic strip created by the German immigrant Rudolph Dirks and drawn by Harold H. Knerr for 37 years (1912 to 1949).  It debuted in 1897 in the American Humorist, the Sunday supplement of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal.  Dirks was the first cartoonist to express dialogue in comic characters through the use of speech balloons.

After a series of legal battles between 1912 and 1914, Dirks left the Hearst organization and began a new strip, first titled Hans and Fritz and then The Captain and the Kids.  It featured the same characters seen in The Katzenjammer Kids.  The two separate versions of the strip competed with each other until 1979, when The Captain and the Kids ended its six-decade run.  The Katzenjammer Kids is still distributed by King Features, making it the oldest comic strip still in syndication and the longest-running ever.

The Katzenjammer Kids was inspired by Max and Moritz, a children's story of the 1860s by German author Wilhelm Busch.  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 shipwrecked sailor who acted as a surrogate father; and der Inspector, an official from the school system.  

Other characters included John Silver, a pirate sea captain and his crew, and King Bongo, a primitive-living but sophisticated-acting black jungle monarch who ruled a tropical island.  Several of the characters spoke in stereotypical German-accented English.  The main plot of the strip was Hans and Fritz would pull a prank or trick on one of the adults which resulted in their being hunted down and given a spanking in the end panel.