Max and Moritz

Max and Moritz is an illustrated story in verse; highly inventive, blackly humorous tale, told entirely in rhymed couplets, written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch. It is among the early works of Busch, nevertheless it already features many substantial, effectually aesthetic and formal regularities, procedures and basic patterns of Busch's later works. Many familiar with comic strip history consider it to have been the direct inspiration for the Katzenjammer Kids. The German title satirizes the German custom of giving a subtitle to the name of dramas in the form of 'A Drama of ... acts', which became dictums in colloquial usage for any event with an unpleasant or dramatic course, e.g. Federal presidential Elections - Drama in Three Acts.