Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip, April 29, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, is among the earliest newspaper strips to develop a fully consistent visual style strip-to-strip. In this four-panel daily, the gruff, checkered-suited Paw Perkins dismisses talk of the adorable Ethel getting sweet on him with a flat "Bah!"; a second character laughs — annotated by Sterrett himself as "decidedly hollow laughter" — before Polly delivers the punchline: Ethel's heart is so hard, nothing makes an impression on it. The final panel suggests a diamond might do the trick. Sterrett's angular draftsmanship, expressive body language, and dry interjected captions show daily newspaper strips codifying the visual grammar — recurring cast, compressed gag structure, speech balloons — that directly preceded and shaped the comic-book format.