Polly and Her Pals — 1917-03-26

Four panels follow Pa Perkins and a gaggle of cats attempting to watch a parade, the joke turning on a concealed 'trick suit' that startles everyone mid-strip. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already distinctive: figures rendered in loose, expressive ink line, cats tumbling across the gutters as recurring comic texture, and speech balloons carrying phonetic dialect ('idear,' 'most how'). Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate; by the late teens he was pushing daily newspaper strips toward an almost Cubist graphic language that would fully flower in the 1920s. These syndicated dailies — cheap, mass-printed, panel-to-panel — directly seeded the reprint comic books of the 1930s, making strips like this one literal ancestors of the modern comic-book form.