Polly and Her Pals — 1925-02-11

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, making it one of the longest-running domestic comedy strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily follows the family's attempt to discover what ails young Ashur: mother dispatches father to knock on the bedroom door, the son shouts that he wishes he were dead, and a figure peering around the door frame delivers the punchline — wondering whether a girl refused him or accepted him. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already confident here: expressive silhouettes, angular figures, and tightly timed panel rhythm. His later Art Deco abstractions would make the strip visually radical, but even this relatively straight example shows the economical storytelling that made newspaper comic strips the direct formal ancestor of the comic book page.