Polly and Her Pals — "She Couldn't Lose"

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, making it one of the longest-running daily strips of the early comic-strip era. This four-panel daily shows Polly's scheming logic in miniature: she saw an adorable hat but didn't buy it — because her strategy requires first showing Pa a *more* expensive one, letting him refuse it, then "compromising" on the one she wanted all along. Sterrett's draftsmanship is economical and expressive, his characters rendered with rubbery, elastic faces that carry the gag cleanly across panels. The strip exemplifies how daily newspaper comics codified the visual grammar — sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring domestic characters — that printers would soon bind into the first comic books.