Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-29

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* for the New York Evening Telegram in 1912, making it one of the longest-running daily strips of the early newspaper era. This 1922 daily shows the strip's signature comic engine: the rotund, checkerboard-trousered Paw Perkins tangled with Neewah, the family's chaos-causing cat. Four tight panels drive a simple revenge gag — Paw, apparently insulted five years ago, finally spots the culprit in a photograph and erupts in delayed outrage. Sterrett's draftsmanship, with its bold outlines and compressed panel staging, exemplifies the daily newspaper strip's role as the direct ancestor of the comic book: recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons, and a punchline panel — the grammar American comics inherited wholesale.