Polly and Her Pals — 1925-03-17

A four-panel daily in Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (launched 1912), one of the longest-running family strips in American newspaper history. Here a rotund Professor bounces and skips, counting aloud as pounds apparently drop away, before landing with a resounding PLOP outside a theater advertising a matinee — earning him a sardonic front-row quip. Sterrett's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: rubbery figures with exaggerated mass, kinetic impact lettering, and tight comic timing across compressed panels. The strip's daily and Sunday pages belong to the generation of newspaper features — alongside *Krazy Kat* and *Gasoline Alley* — whose recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panel grammar directly furnished the structural vocabulary that early comic books would wholesale adopt by the late 1930s.