Polly and Her Pals — "Paw's Rapid Fire Vision"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, is one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This daily shows Polly and her mother trying to recall a film actress, while Paw — the strip's true comic engine — confesses he can never remember movie players because they go "in one eye an' out the other," illustrated by a literal iris-to-iris diagram floating above his head. Four compact panels, hand-lettered dialogue in balloons, and Sterrett's confident brushwork carry the gag efficiently. Strips like this one were the direct raw material of the first comic books, which were simply reprinted newspaper pages — making Sterrett and his peers the accidental architects of an entire medium's visual language.