Polly and Her Pals — 1917-07-12

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* for the New York Evening Telegram in 1912, and its daily strips rank among the most formally inventive work in early American comics. This six-panel daily turns on Pa's attempt to dodge home-guard duty: the family's imposing matriarch blocks the doorway while Pa offers comic protest, then capitulates completely, trotting off to patrol 'the sunny side of the street' with umbrella in hand. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already confident — chunky, crosshatched figures, expressive speech balloons, and a clean left-to-right gag build. Newspaper syndication of strips like this one directly supplied the page-filler material that earliest comic book publishers would simply reprint, making the daily strip the literal raw material from which the comic book industry was assembled.