Polly and Her Pals — PO361214

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* debuted in 1912 and became one of the most visually inventive strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily, titled "Nothing Stops the U.S. Mail," tracks a letter's comic journey: a chaotic household dispatch, a harried postal worker, and a punchline delivered in the final panel where a character remarks that two people not on speaking terms are reduced to mailing notes to each other under the same roof. Sterrett's draftsmanship is confident and loose — chunky figures, expressive faces, busy crosshatching. His strip's long run in Hearst syndication placed it squarely in the lineage of newspaper comics that established recurring characters, sequential panel flow, and integrated speech balloons as the foundational grammar the comic book would inherit wholesale.