Polly and Her Pals — "Paw Puts On the Soft Pedal"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of newspaper comics' most formally inventive strips. This daily strip shows Paw — the perpetually exasperated patriarch — threatening violence against anyone who mentions crossword puzzles, only to be immediately buttonholed by a neighbor demanding he try one, then tumbling into the curtains, and finally being recruited by Reverend Davidson for infant Sunday school classes. Four tight panels carry a clean comic arc: bluster, irony, slapstick, punchline. Sterrett's draftsmanship here is relatively restrained compared to his celebrated Sunday page experiments, but the expressive figure-work and brisk balloon placement show exactly the visual shorthand that newspaper daily strips refined into the grammar comic books would inherit wholesale.