Polly and Her Pals — 1917-01-08

Four daily panels follow Pa Perkins as he posts a New Year's resolution swearing off lost tempers, cussing, and violence, then immediately dispatches Neewah on an errand — only to be told the task is impossible. Pa erupts, then catches himself: since he can't predict when he'll need Neewah, he'll take no chances on losing him. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, and by 1917 had developed the strip's dense cross-hatching and expressive balloon lettering into a recognizable personal style. Newspaper strips like this one were the direct incubator of the American comic book: their recurring casts, sequential panels, and speech-balloon conventions established the visual grammar that anthology reprint comics of the 1930s would simply bind between covers.