Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Four panels follow a character dodging juggled hats hurled by the off-panel Tumble Brothers, stomping the hats flat to drive the jugglers away, then accepting grateful thanks — and the battered lids — from two top-hatted bystanders, Mr. Perkins and Mr. Neewah. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, making it one of the longest-running early newspaper strips. Sterrett's draftsmanship grew increasingly geometric through the 1920s — jagged shadows, tilted floors, cubist-influenced backgrounds — while the daily gag format he worked in was the direct commercial and formal ancestor of the comic book, which emerged in the 1930s by reprinting exactly these syndicated strips.