Polly and Her Pals — March 28, 1922

Four panels track Paw Perkins through a bad morning: a piano player pounds out "Pack Up Your Troubles" while Paw grumbles "Bah!"; he complains to a round-headed companion that life's ups and downs are awful, especially the downs; a third character dismisses the "ups" as abominable; Paw finally explodes that he hasn't been hard-up a day since his friend knew him. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already distinctive — elastic figures, bold hatching, expressive silhouettes. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the early 1920s his Sunday pages were pushing panel composition toward near-abstraction. These syndicated newspaper strips — distributed by Newspaper Feature Service — formed the direct visual and commercial foundation from which the comic book format would emerge within the decade.