Polly and Her Pals — "Paw Does His Stuff"

Four panels track Paw — summoned by his wife to perform a promised parlor trick before Saturday's party — as he wiggles his ears, invisible to her eyes until the punchline reveals she missed the whole display. Sterrett's draftsmanship is precise and kinetic: Paw's checked trousers and angular silhouette contrast with the women's rounder forms, while speech balloons carry a vaudeville cadence in phonetic dialect. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in the *New York Evening Journal* in 1912, became one of the most formally inventive strips of its era — Sterrett later pushed panel geometry toward near-abstraction. These newspaper dailies and Sunday pages are the direct ancestors of the comic book format, proving the medium's visual grammar was fully alive decades before the first stapled anthology.