Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran until 1958, making it one of the longest-lived newspaper strips in American history. This daily strip shows Polly's father Paw — the strip's true comedic engine — trying to evict a late-staying suitor named Mr. Swiftle while Ma intervenes. Four panels carry the gag from Paw's muttered threats, through Swiftle's fumbling attempt to move a piano under a chandelier to read sheet music, to Polly hauling him off in the dark. Sterrett's draftsmanship grew increasingly abstract over the decades; even here his angular figures and bold black silhouettes anticipate the Cubist-inflected Sunday pages that would make him a cartoonists' cartoonist. The strip's recurring domestic triangle — fussy Paw, sensible Ma, fashionable Polly — gave American readers a reliable weekly household to revisit, a structural habit the comic book would later inherit wholesale.