Polly and Her Pals — January 27, 1925

Four daily panels follow Paw Perkins caught practicing a secret parlor trick — contorting his body while studying himself in a hand mirror. Daughter Susie presses him about whether he'll be ready for Saturday night's party; Paw protests he's been perfecting this trick for forty years and it's "no cinch." Sterrett's linework is already pushing toward the geometric abstraction that would define his later Sunday pages: chunky crosshatching, fluid figure poses, expressive balloon lettering. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first strips to place a young woman at center — though here the domestic comedy belongs entirely to Paw. These daily strips, syndicated nationally, were the direct raw material from which 1930s publishers assembled the first comic books, reprinting exactly this format page by page.