Polly and Her Pals — "They're Influencing Pa Financially"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* ran in Hearst newspapers from 1912 and ranks among the earliest strips to develop a genuinely modernist drawing style. This daily strip tracks a con involving the "Secret S.O.S. of the Royal Flushers," whose members perform ritual nonsense chants—"Goola Goola!" "Boola Boola!"—apparently to fleece Pa. The panel flow moves cleanly left to right: introduction, ceremony, chaos, domestic punchline, with Polly closing the gag from a chaise longue. Sterrett's figures already show the angular, Art Deco draftsmanship that would distinguish his Sunday pages by the 1920s. Such newspaper strips—syndicated, daily, reader-habituating—directly supplied the content for the earliest comic book reprints, making them the functional origin of the medium itself.