Polly and Her Pals — 1925-03-09

Four panels follow Paw, a barrel-chested curmudgeon in plaid knickerbockers, as he sounds off about the unwelcome Mr. Swiffle — then turns the problem over to his mechanic Arthur, who is instructed to find what ails the visitor's car and report back fast. Arthur discovers the car has tipped over entirely, leaving Paw spluttering in the final panel while Polly deadpans, 'You said it.' Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the mid-1920s his linework had grown increasingly geometric and bold — anticipating the cubist flourishes that would mark his later Sunday pages. Daily strips like this one, syndicated across hundreds of papers, gave American readers recurring characters and reliable comic rhythm: precisely the storytelling conventions that prototype comic books would inherit wholesale when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips as pamphlets in the early 1930s.