Polly and Her Pals — PO361211

Four daily panels follow two rumpled visitors fretting over the bedridden Sam, then interrogating his glamorous trained nurse, then reporting breathlessly to Mrs. Perkins that Sam needs a parade of specialists. Sterrett's line is loose and expressive—Sam's bulk sunk in pillows, the nurse's tall silhouette cutting a sharp diagonal against the worried men's rounded forms. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran four decades, making it one of American newspaper comics' longest-lived strips. Sterrett pioneered bold abstract backgrounds and Cubist-influenced design in Sunday pages years before fine-art critics noticed comics. His work, like that of Winsor McCay and George Herriman, helped forge the visual grammar—recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons—that daily strips handed directly to the first comic books of the late 1930s.