Polly and Her Pals — 1914-01-02

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 as one of the earliest newspaper strips built around a recurring family ensemble. This daily — titled "Pa Gets Some Real Sympathy" — runs six panels left to right, tracking Pa's frazzled nerves through a sympathetic listener who turns out to be a drinking companion. Sterrett's linework is already assured: expressive body language, overlapping speech balloons, and a plaid-suited Pa whose rubbery physicality anticipates the strip's later Art Deco abstraction. The final panel gag lands with deadpan economy. Newspaper dailies like this one forged the sequential grammar — recurring cast, panel-to-panel causality, punch-line closure — that would directly feed the first comic book reprints of the 1930s, making strips such as this foundational documents of the medium's invention.