Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (launched 1912, *New York Evening Telegram*) is among the most formally inventive strips of the early newspaper era. This four-panel daily follows Polly's mother, Maw, belting out "When Meg and I Were Young" at the piano while a startled bird flees the room; a male character flatly declares the song will never die; Maw retorts, "You said it, so!"; the final panel reveals she has been murdering it for two solid hours. Sterrett's draftsmanship is unusually bold — angular chairs, dense crosshatching, expressive silhouettes — anticipating the Art Deco abstraction his Sunday pages would carry further. The strip demonstrates how recurring domestic characters and sequential gag structure, refined in the newspaper comic pages of the 1910s–20s, supplied the direct template for the comic-book format that followed.