'The Captain and the Kids' (1964).
John Dirks was an American comic artist, best-known for assisting and eventually succeeding his father, Rudolph Dirks, on his long-running gag comic 'The Captain and the Kids'. From 1946 until 1962, he helped out with scripts and artwork. From 1962 until the final episode in 1979, Dirks was the second and last artist to continue the pranks of Hans, Fritz, Der Mamma and Der Captain.
Early life and career
John Dirks was born in 1917 as the son of Rudolph Dirks, the comic pioneer who had launched the gag comic 'The Katzenjammer Kids' in 1887. John studied English and Fine Arts at Yale University in New York, where he graduated in 1939. During this decade, he published his earliest illustrations in magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1941, the United States entered World War II, and John was one of several young men to be drafted. He rose to the rank of Captain. After the war had ended, he illustrated books.
'The Captain and the Kids' of 21 October 1956, by Rudolph and John Dirks.
The Captain and the Kids
In 1946, John Dirks turned to cartooning, following in his father's footsteps. Father Rudolph Dirks had met his first success between 1897 and 1913 with the widely translated and imitated gag comic 'The Katzenjammer Kids', about two young brats who enjoy playing tricks and pranks on adults. However, a dispute between Rudolph and his publisher William Randolph Hearst ended his tenure on the strip in 1913. A court battle about the rights to the characters ensued, resulting in the settlement that Dirks owned the rights to the comic's characters, but Hearst to the series' title. As a result, 'The Katzenjammer Kids' could continue in Hearst's papers, drawn by Harold Knerr, while Dirks relaunched his comic in Joseph Pulitzer's The New York World, eventually under the title 'The Captain and the Kids'. Since 1914, 'The Captain and the Kids' had been continued by Rudolph Dirks and various assistants (Oscar Hitt, Perce Pearce and Bernard Dibble). In direct rivalry with Harold Knerr's 'The Katzenjammer Kids', Dirks' 'Captain and the Kids' followed almost the same changes, character introductions and narrative topics as Knerr's, and vice versa.
When in 1946 John Dirks started assisting his father on 'The Captain and the Kids', he brought a fresh new take to the series, introducing more outlandish storylines that brought the cast to the Abominable Snowman and into outer space. After Rudolph Dirks' retirement in 1962, John continued the series on his own, but didn't sign it until his father's death in 1968. Working through the United Feature Syndicate, he drew it right until the final episode ran in the papers on 15 April 1979.
'The Captain and the Kids' (3 October 1971).
Final years and death
In 1995, John Dirks was brought back from cartooning retirement for a special honorary occasion. The following year, U.S. newspaper comics celebrated their 100th anniversary, taking the first appearance of speech balloons in Richard F. Outcault's 'The Yellow Kid' in 1896 as the official starting point. The U.S. Postal Service released a series of stamps, honoring various classic U.S. newspaper comics. 'The Katzenjammer Kids' naturally couldn't be forgotten. Comic expert Rick Marschall was consulted to pick out a fitting image from Rudolph Dirks' version. He found a suitable 1917 episode in which a goat eats the books of side characters Der Captain and Der Inspektor. Technically, this particular gag hadn't been published under the title 'Katzenjammer Kids', but 'Hans and Fritz', since in 1917 Dirks didn't own the rights to his original title any longer. But purists didn't object. A more important problem was that almost all the original creators of the newspaper comics honored with their own stamp had passed away. To redraw and redesign some of the original images, younger artists had to be brought in. In Rudolph Dirks' case, Marschall was lucky that his son John Dirks was still alive and eager to do the job.
Outside of his cartooning career, John Dirks was also a noted sculptor, working with mixed metal fountains. In 2010, he passed away in Mystic, Connecticut.
'The Captain and the Kids' (5 September 1971).