Polly and Her Pals

Four panels of Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* follow a simple domestic chain reaction: Kawina, billed as "the Hawaiian Stray Cat," plays guitar in an angular Hawaiian style; her caterwauling drives Paw Perkins to fury; he orders the cat removed before the moaning and groaning wake the neighborhood; the final panel dissolves into overlapping sound-effect lettering and comic chaos. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already bold here — thick ink, elastic figures, expressive balloon lettering that visually *performs* sound. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly and Her Pals* belongs to the generation of newspaper strips — alongside *Krazy Kat* and *Bringing Up Father* — whose daily and Sunday pages invented recurring cast comedy, sequential panel grammar, and the visual vocabulary that publishers would soon cut, bind, and sell as comic books.