Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 as one of the first newspaper strips built around a recurring female lead. This daily strip, copyright 1916 by Newspaper Feature Service, runs six panels in Sterrett's loose, rubbery line: Paw frets that Polly's turtle has escaped the aquarium again; Ma refuses to shop until the creature is found; the turtle crawls onto a dozing Paw's arm, triggering his panicked yell; and Polly, unfazed, heads out with instructions to be back by sunset. Speech balloons carry thick vernacular dialogue — 'Ain't agonna,' 'Yer sure' — woven into the action without captions. Sterrett's strip belongs squarely in the daily-newspaper lineage that gave comic books their visual grammar: regular characters, sequential panels, integrated text, and the running domestic situation that readers returned to each day.