Polly and Her Pals — PO361208

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, is among the longest-running and most visually inventive strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily, titled 'The Sprinkling System,' follows the blustering Paw Perkins, who insists the car turn back because he forgot to shut off the furnace — only to admit in the punchline he actually left the bathtub water running. Sterrett's chunky figures, expressive word balloons crammed with dialect spelling, and crisp black-ink linework are all on display. The strip predates the comic book format by decades; these syndicated dailies — with their recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons — supplied the direct grammar that anthology comic books would simply repackage after 1933.