Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip, March 21, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* began in 1912 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest-lived American newspaper comic strips. This four-panel daily follows Mama Cat and a visiting Mr. Perkins as they learn that the family's nephew Ashur — whose expensive education is the strip's running joke — has "adopted a profession at last": working in movies. The women's fan-fluttering excitement builds panel by panel, culminating in Mama Cat's breathless "Oh! How perfectly fascinating!" Sterrett's draftsmanship is precise and fluid, his staging economical. Newspaper dailies like this one directly shaped the comic book format: the panel grid, speech balloons, and recurring character ensemble all migrated wholesale into the pamphlet medium that emerged in the 1930s.