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Page 29 of 35
 Though McCay, Feininger and Herriman may have been pioneering in the artistic sense, their strips did not necessarily do the best commercially. The really popular, and extensively syndicated, stories tended to be more lightweight, with an emphasis on slapstick. One example was the dumber kind of 'kid' strip. The archetype here was undoubtedly Rudolph Dirks's 'Katzenjammer Kids', about the antics of two German immigrant urchins, Hans and Fritz: an exercise in raucous vulgarity which became the longest-running strip in American history. (Feininger's 'Kin-der-Kids' had been intended as a direct competitor.) Others included Carl Schultze's 'Foxy Grandpa' (1900), about an old man who outfoxes his nephews; and Richard Outcault's 'Buster Brown' (1902), a follow-up to 'The Yellow Kid', about a middle-class brat dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, who constantly breaks his promises to be good.
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The Pioneers