Polly and Her Pals — 1917-08-22

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by 1917 it was among the most visually inventive strips in American papers. This daily follows Polly's negotiation with her rotund, exasperated father Paw: she wants movie permission, delivers a six-foot stack of supper dishes as her "favor," and punctuates the gag with a chase across the final panel. Sterrett's brushwork is dense and energetic — heavy blacks, expressive silhouettes, overlapping word balloons driving pace. The strip exemplifies how Hearst and Scripps-Howard dailies were formalizing the grammar of sequential cartooning: consistent recurring characters, panel-to-panel causality, and dialogue that carries story load. These newspaper pages, accumulated and reprinted, directly produced the first comic books of the 1930s.