Polly and Her Pals

Five panels follow Pa Perkins as he pursues a deadbeat named "Mr. Posterity" who owes him $350 — a sum blown on a moving-picture machine. Every passerby claims total ignorance of the man; the strip's punchline lands when Pa's own account book turns up, conspicuous by Posterity's absence. Sterrett draws in a tight, crosshatched daily style: rubbery figures, expressive silhouettes, and speech balloons packed with period vernacular. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly and Her Pals* became a laboratory for Sterrett's increasingly abstract Sunday pages — geometric backgrounds, Cubist-inflected décor — that would influence a generation of cartoonists. The newspaper strip format it exemplifies is the direct ancestor of the comic book: recurring cast, sequential panels, proprietary visual grammar invented strip by strip.