Polly and Her Pals — 1917-05-29

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 in the New York Evening Telegram and ran until 1958, making it one of the longest-lived daily strips in American newspaper history. This installment — titled *Delicia Just Will Have Her Chance* — unfolds across six horizontal panels following nurse Naomi, the hapless patient Mr. Perkins, and the would-be caregiver Delicia, whose comic incompetence drives the gag to its pratfall finish. Sterrett's linework is crisp and economical; speech balloons carry distinct vernacular voices, and his panel-to-panel staging shows the confident visual grammar newspaper artists were then standardizing. Those daily strips, syndicated coast to coast, supplied the reprinted pages that became the first comic books in the early 1930s.