Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, and this early daily strip shows his formula already locked in: Pa — bowler-hatted, short-fused — storms home demanding dinner, while the household scatters in slapstick panic across four tight panels. Sound effects (BANG, SLAM, CRASH, THUMP) crowd the gutters; characters run past one another in breathless overlapping action. Sterrett's linework is dense and kinetic, his staging reading left-to-right with clean cause-and-effect logic. The strip's long run — it lasted until 1958 — placed it among the foundational newspaper dailies whose recurring characters, panel grids, and speech balloons collectively invented the visual language that comic books would inherit wholesale two decades later.