Polly and Her Pals — New Year's Greeting Strip

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in the *New York Evening Telegram* in 1912, quickly becoming one of the most visually inventive strips of the early syndicate era. This holiday panel stretches the full newspaper width: the word-image hybrid letters of HAPPY NEW YEAR double as architecture for the scene, with a toddler New Year standing left, a Scottish terrier mid-strip, a cluster of celebrating adults center, and the departing winged figure of 1913 — clutching a sheaf labeled *BILLS* — shuffling right with the speech balloon "I'LL LEAVE THESE WITH YOU, OLE TOP." The integrated lettering-as-composition trick shows the strip-page artists of this period actively constructing the visual grammar — speech balloons, recurring cast, timed gag — that would define comic books two decades later.