Polly and Her Pals — PO361215

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, is among the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily, titled *An Axe to Grind*, centers on the rotund, scene-stealing Aunt Susie and a male companion trading dialect-heavy dialogue about a missing banjo — the instrument turns up playing itself by the final panel, a neat sight-gag payoff. Sterrett's linework is loose and rubbery, his compositions dense with cross-hatching. Strips like this one are primary documents: the syndicated newspaper daily invented sequential visual storytelling — recurring cast, panel-to-panel continuity, speech balloons — the entire grammar that comic books, arriving in the 1930s, simply reprinted and then inherited.