Polly and Her Pals — June 22, 1925

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 as one of the earliest recurring-character newspaper strips built around a young woman protagonist. This four-panel daily shows the comic's domestic triangle in action: Paw grumbles inside about the persistent suitor Joe Egg loitering on the porch; Joe serenades Polly with breathless declarations; Polly rolls her eyes; and Paw plots to dispatch the nuisance himself. Sterrett draws in a clean, economical line with expressive figures and speech balloons that carry the rhythmic timing of vaudeville. Strips like this one—syndicated to hundreds of papers by Newspaper Feature Service—were the direct precursors of the comic book, their recurring casts, sequential panels, and balloon-driven dialogue establishing the visual grammar that defined the medium.