Polly and Her Pals — 1925-02-09

Four panels establish a classic comic-strip economy of misunderstanding. A harried businessman insists he can't see anyone on his busy day; his assistant announces it's Miss Polly. "Show her in," he concedes — "the only way to get rid of her is to see her." He orders her to be short and snappy. She enters enormous, swathed in a massive fur coat, and announces: "I am!" Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 as a Hearst daily, became one of the era's most stylistically adventurous strips — the Sunday pages especially grew into near-abstract Art Deco compositions. Sterrett's clean linework and precise panel-to-panel timing demonstrate the visual grammar that newspaper comic strips codified before comic books existed as a format.