Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the mid-1920s it was among the most visually inventive strips in syndication. This four-panel daily centers not on Polly but on her father Paw Perkins and his rotund neighbor, who brags that sold property has tripled in value and all his investments are up — then immediately phones to order new furniture on credit, the punchline landing in the final panel. The art is dense with crosshatching, expressive bulk, and overlapping speech balloons — exactly the visual grammar pioneered on newspaper pages that direct-fed the first comic book reprint collections of the 1930s. Sterrett's work is a primary document of how page-based sequential cartooning codified its own conventions before the comic book existed as a format.