Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (1912–1958) is one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This daily, signed by Sterrett and dated Jan. 14, runs four panels: Paw tries to escape the household's crossword-puzzle craze into a stormy night, only to land at a club where a fellow player asks him for a six-letter word for 'idiotic'—answered in the final panel by a cuckoo clock springing out at him. Sterrett's draftsmanship is fluid and kinetic; rain streaks fill the second panel with genuine atmospheric weight. Strips like this one, syndicated daily to millions, established the recurring-cast situation comedy, the timed visual punchline, and the speech balloon conventions that comic books would inherit wholesale when publishers began reprinting newspaper pages in the early 1930s.