Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 as a newspaper daily for the New York Evening Telegram, making it one of the longest-running strips of the era. This four-panel daily follows Polly's father and a companion debating whether Bill's Business College has done Polly any good — then cuts to Polly herself, magnificently fur-coated and hat-plumed, coolly informing them she has held eight jobs in ten days of graduation. The punchline belongs entirely to her. Sterrett's draftsmanship here is pre-Cubist in its decorative density — layered black fur, crosshatching, ornate hats — foreshadowing the wildly abstracted Sunday pages he would produce through the 1920s–30s. Newspaper strips like this one, syndicated daily into millions of homes, supplied both the audience and the page-format blueprint that 1930s publishers would bind together and call comic books.