Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* ran from 1912 to 1958, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This daily shows Paw — the strip's bumbling, checkered-trousered patriarch — receiving two letters from Polly's traveling companions: one postmarked a Buffalo police station, the other a Chicago hospital. The gag lands on Paw's sputtering bewilderment in the final panel, a classic Sterrett slow burn. Sterrett drew with bold, economical linework and a flair for expressive silhouette; his Sunday pages would later grow into near-abstract Cubist compositions. Syndicated dailies like this one were the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the comic book — panel grids, speech balloons, recurring cast — assembled, reprinted, and sold as pamphlets throughout the 1930s.