The film tells the story of the Dirks brothers, from Heide (in Holstein, Germany), who emigrated to the US as children with their family at the end of the 19th century. As young men, they tried to make their fortune in New York as cartoonists for the popular comic strips in the daily newspapers. Rudolph Dirks became famous with the anarchic cartoon “The Katzenjammer Kids”; the colourful drawings of the captain, who speaks in a bilingual pidgin, were especially popular with the numerous immigrants to the country. His younger brother, Gus, is considered a pioneer of animal comics. The film’s director sets off on a transatlantic journey of discovery with Tim Eckhorst, a cartoonist from Kiel who has been researching the Dirks for a decade. The trip takes them from the brothers’ northern German hometown to New York and on to Ogunquit, on the southern coast of Maine, an artists’ colony that greatly influenced Rudolph during his life.