page_title: Max and Moritz
section_title: The pranks
hierarchical_section_title: Max and Moritz / The pranks
context_page_description: Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks is a German language illustrated story in verse. This highly inventive, blackly humorous tale, told entirely in rhymed couplets, was written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch and published in 1865. It is among the early works of Busch, yet it already featured 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 and Quick & Flupke. The German title satirizes the German custom of giving a subtitle to the name of dramas in the form of "Ein Drama in ... Akten", which became dictum in colloquial usage for any event with an unpleasant or dramatic course, e.g. "Bundespräsidentenwahl - Drama in drei Akten".
context_section_description: There have been several English translations of the original German verses over the years, but all have maintained the original trochaic tetrameter:
caption: The teacher with his pipe (fourth trick)
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