Polly and Her Pals — "Paw Needs a Checkerless Checker Board"

Cliff Sterrett's daily strip follows Paw, the family patriarch, through four compact panels: first grumbling about crossword puzzles, then challenged to checkers by two cronies named Sam'l and Isiah, then apparently forgetting how to play, and finally revealed to hate the checker board because it *reminds* him of crossword puzzles. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already assured — expressive figures, clean panel borders, speech balloons that shape the comic timing. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 as one of America's earliest recurring-character newspaper strips, part of the Hearst syndicate stable whose Sunday pages and dailies furnished the direct template — page format, sequential panels, reprint collections — for the comic book format that would crystallize commercially by the late 1930s.