Polly and Her Pals — "A Rattling Good Car"

Cliff Sterrett's four-panel daily follows Paw as he chugs along in a disintegrating automobile — the car rattles, klunks, and plinks its way across each panel while Polly, mortified, pleads for the wreck to simply fall apart already. Paw's dry retort — "No such luck, sister" — lands the gag cleanly, and a final panel has him muttering that the dealer swore it would "last forever. Dag-nab-it!" Sterrett's draftsmanship is angular and kinetic, sound effects integrated as physical objects in the composition. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, was among the earliest strips to build a recurring domestic cast, and Sterrett's later work would push newspaper-strip art toward near-abstract design — a direct ancestor of everything the comic book would inherit.