From the exhibition
Polly and Her Pals — 1922-02-28
· Cliff Sterrett, February 28, 1922. Syndicated daily strip. Newspaper Features Service.
Titled *It Sounded Like a Bad Case of Heart Trouble*, this four-panel daily follows a doctor interrupted mid-meal by a telephone call: a caller insists in a "dying voice" that he cannot live another minute without the doctor — who, upon hearing it is the pest Percy, waves him off entirely. Polly delivers the punchline from offstage. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, and by 1922 his draftsmanship — angular figures, kinetic staging, expressive balloon lettering — was already influencing the visual language that newspaper comic pages had been building since Outcault's *Yellow Kid* (1895). These syndicated dailies and Sunday pages, reprinted and stapled into pamphlets through the 1930s, are the direct precursors of the comic book format.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
