Max and Moritz by Wilhelm Busch was originally published in Germany in 1865. More of a book than a comic strip, it was originally titled Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks. It was a darkly humorous tale told in rhyming couplets about two naughty boys. It was -- and still is -- a popular and well known story in Europe. The "pranks" are all pretty awful. In one of them, the boys feed bread cubes tied with string to chickens and ... well, as you can see, things go from bad to worse.
So, the mama decides to cook the chicken, while the impish boys fish out the cooked fowls.
These are the first couple of Boyish Pranks. The book is still in print, and was a direct inspiration for The Katzenjammer Kids by Rudolph Dirks, which began in 1897. This was the beginning of the "bad boy" comic strip, a popular premise for later hit features like Dennis the Menace and Calvin and Hobbes. The Katzenjammers are still syndicated by King Features today.
The fascinating thing is that I just learned that Max and Moritz, now over 150 years later, figure in the title sequence of a 2020 TV series called The Defeated, which is about Berlin in 1946. Here's the title sequence from the Netflix series:
The fascinating thing is that I just learned that Max and Moritz, now over 150 years later, figure in the title sequence of a 2020 TV series called The Defeated, which is about Berlin in 1946. Here's the title sequence from the Netflix series:
I have not seen the program, and I doubt that the chickens or any of the other pranks figure into it. But it's an amazing legacy that deserved to be noted. And, the funny thing is, I was just lecturing about all this in my History of Comics class yesterday! Max und Moritz live on! Wow.
My thanks to Guy Lawley for the heads up.
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