Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett's daily strip opens on a small round-faced figure announcing that the publisher's valet has come to call, setting off a four-panel comedy of manners about a missing pair of socks. The tall, pinstriped master grows increasingly agitated as his valet confesses the theft, then spots the culprit wearing the stolen white-silk-with-black-dots hosiery and bellows "AH HAH!" The final panel deflates his outrage with a cheerful non-sequitur. Sterrett's draftsmanship is assured — confident ink lines, expressive silhouettes, fluid staging — already showing the geometric abstraction that would mark his later Sunday pages. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the strips whose accumulated daily and Sunday pages were physically bound and sold as early comic books, making newspaper strips the direct parents of the medium.