Polly and Her Pals — 1925-03-11

Four panels follow Paw, the barrel-shaped patriarch, grumbling that Polly wastes her evenings among "cake-eaters" instead of reading. Her beau arrives brandishing a mandolin, wagering he can explain the difference between a G and a D string — Paw interrupts, seizes the instrument, and launches into his own plunking performance, boasting Harvard-sophomore credentials and a singing voice to match. The final panel silhouettes Paw playing contentedly while Polly and her fellow watch from the doorway. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, making it one of the longest-running newspaper comic strips. Its elastic figures and crowded speech balloons exemplify the daily strip's role as the direct ancestor of the comic book — serialized characters, panel-to-panel action, and typeset dialogue inside balloons constituting the visual language that page-bound comics would inherit wholesale.