Polly and Her Pals — 1914-01-09

A dog becomes the unwilling guinea pig for a nicotine-suppressant pill in this daily strip by Cliff Sterrett. The opening panel establishes the premise—a character reads a druggist's guarantee and decides to test the remedy on the family dog before trying it himself. What follows is pure pantomime: the animal's violent, spinning reaction escalates across six panels, culminating in a whirlwind vortex and the owner's rueful declaration that he'd rather die with his boots on than endure such a spectacle. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already fluid and confident, his figure work loose but precise. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, belongs to the generation of newspaper strips—alongside *Krazy Kat* and *Mutt and Jeff*—whose daily and Sunday pages invented the sequential panel grammar that comic books would later inherit wholesale.