Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, and it ran for nearly four decades. This daily strip opens with Polly asking her mother what to wear for a French count's visit; the joke pivots immediately to Paw wrestling with his income-tax return before a tax official — the self-announced "Count De Lay" — arrives instead, demanding chairs and scrutinizing deductions. Four compact panels, brisk cross-talk, and Sterrett's fluid brush line carry the gag cleanly. Sterrett was among the first cartoonists to push newspaper strips toward genuine graphic invention; his Sunday pages would later adopt bold Cubist geometry, but even these unpretentious dailies show the confident panel-to-panel rhythm that made the newspaper page the direct ancestor of the comic book format.