Polly and Her Pals — 1917-05-19

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, and it ran for decades as one of the most visually inventive strips in American papers. This daily strip, subtitled *A Soul Without a Single Thought*, follows a garrulous character spinning an aviation yarn across four panels: he imagines being a pilot who'd sensibly pack a lunch basket, then riffs on running out of gasoline mid-air, being stranded aloft for days, and concludes that merely talking about it makes him hungry — at which point a small figure blows a trumpet directly at him. Sterrett's loose, energetic linework and expressive figures show the daily strip format already fully mature: sequential panels, anchored speech balloons, and a recurring cast that defined what the nascent comic book would later codify and collect.