Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the mid-1920s it had become one of the most visually adventurous strips in American newspapers. This daily follows four panels of domestic comedy: Pa is asked to drive the scatterbrained Dotty home; he demurs, proposing a taxi instead; the pair then eye their cab driver—a hulking, glowering figure—with nervous anticipation, while Polly, arriving last, delivers the punchline with arch composure. Sterrett's draftsmanship here is already pushing toward the bold geometric abstraction that would distinguish his Sunday pages. The strip exemplifies how newspaper dailies—assembled into reprint pamphlets through the late 1920s and early 1930s—directly seeded the comic book format, proving that recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons could sustain loyal mass readership week after week.