Polly and Her Pals — 1917-06-07

Four panels follow an elderly woman knitting an impossibly long muffler, her yarn coiling across the floor in great tangles. A goggle-eyed young man and a rotund uncle named Sammy press her to finish; she deflects both by revealing she cannot "cast off" — only Polly knows how — and dassn't ask Polly because the muffler is meant as Polly's surprise gift. Sterrett's linework is confident and loose, his figures rubbery and expressive, his dialect spelling phonetically dense. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first newspaper strips to develop a consistent ensemble cast and running domestic situations, modeling the strip format — sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring characters — that editors would soon bind into the first comic books.