Polly and Her Pals — 1922-02-06

"Neewah Had Done Everything but That" A four-panel daily strip by Clifford Sterrett traces a single domestic crisis: Polly's father Paw has spots on his pants, and the handyman Neewah has exhausted every remedy — soap and water, No-Motto, gasoline, Grease-60 — before a neighbor asks whether he's tried ammonia. Neewah's punchline: he hasn't tried it *on the pants*, but he's confident it will work. Sterrett's draftsmanship is angular and kinetic, figures leaning at sharp diagonals, speech balloons tightly integrated into dense crosshatched compositions. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first newspaper strips to develop a stable ensemble cast and sophisticated panel sequencing — formal innovations that would define the comic book page long before the first anthology reprint appeared.