Polly and Her Pals

Four panels set at the beach: a flapper breaks off her engagement, explaining to a seated suitor that she smelled tobacco on his last kiss. He defends the girl — 'Jess cause she smokes ain't nuthin agin the gal!' — only to be told she doesn't smoke at all, whereupon he splashes face-first into the surf. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, making it one of the longest-running American newspaper comic strips. His linework — loose, rubbery figures, expressive silhouettes, brisk panel-to-panel momentum — typifies the daily newspaper strip's role as the direct ancestor of the comic book: recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons, and comedic timing compressed into inches of newsprint column.