Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Four panels track Paw Perkins seeking relief from summer heat: finding the parlor commandeered by Ashur's crowd, he tries the front porch, then the back porch, finally settling moonlit and alone on the roof with a lamp and a book. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, and by the mid-1920s its bold black-and-white dailies showed his signature syncopated linework — staccato cross-hatching, exaggerated silhouettes, characters mid-song rendered with floating musical notes. The strip's domestic situation comedy, recurring cast, and tight panel-to-panel cause-and-effect were exactly the conventions that early comic-book publishers would repackage wholesale when anthology reprint titles appeared in the 1930s, making newspaper strips the direct prototype for the comic book as a format.