The Katzenjammer Kids Shilling All-Bran

Rudolph Dirks created The Katzenjammer Kids in 1897 for William Randolph Hearst's American Humorist. Between 1912 and 1914, Dirks and Hearst got into a legal battle over the rights of the characters and Hearst was able to keep the rights to the Katzenjammer Kids name, getting a new artist, Harold H. Knerr, to draw the strip.

Dirks, though, created essentially the same strip again, this time calling it Hans und Fritz. In 1918, he renamed it to The Captain and the Kids and it directly competed with The Katzenjammer Kids for the next several decades, but both remained popular at least through the 1960s.

Here's an ad I stumbled across in a 1940 issue of Life technically featuring The Captain and the Kids, although it may as well have been the Katzenjammer Kids. I'm fairly confident Dirks himself created this.

Although... comic strip characters talking about how great it is to be regular? By eating "a natural laxative cereal"? T!M!I!

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