Polly and Her Pals

Six panels follow a family's comic alarm over Pa's new aviation outfit. A woman reports to a large-nosed matron that Pa is flying in Colonel Hawk's aeroplane; a round child rushes to announce the Colonel is waiting outside; Pa then appears swaddled in an enormous fur flying suit — which everybody mistakes for a diving suit. The strip closes with the deadpan verdict: "modern flyin' is fifty per cent divin'." Sterrett's line work is loose and expressive, his figures rubbery, his lettering energetic. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in the *New York Evening Journal* in 1912 and ran until 1958, making it one of the longest-running American comic strips. Sterrett pioneered increasingly abstract, Cubist-influenced Sunday pages through the 1920s–30s, demonstrating how the newspaper strip — daily and Sunday alike — was the direct seedbed from which the modern comic book format grew.