Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 as one of the earliest newspaper strips built around a recurring domestic cast rather than a single gag character. This daily strip, headed *"Pa Assails Tempter, But Falls for the Temptation,"* runs six panels: Pa grumbles about the smoke-filled house overrun by cats, hatches a scheme to persuade neighbor Ashur to quit smoking and give up his cigars — then immediately caves and cadges one for himself. Sterrett draws in a tight, economical pen line; speech balloons pack vernacular phonetic dialogue. The strip's generational family structure — blustering Pa, sensible Ma, the offscreen Polly — pioneered the formula that would define American comic strips for decades and feed directly into the first comic-book reprints of the 1930s.