Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and quickly became one of the most artistically adventurous strips in American newspapers. This four-panel daily follows a recurring domestic comedy: Pa spots a peeping tom at the window, a policeman arrives and offers him a cigar, the intruder declines — he doesn't smoke — and Pa's wife (Maw) sits smoking contentedly in the final panel as Pa laments his ignorance. The gag turns on domestic irony, with Sterrett's cross-hatched figures and expressive postures doing as much work as the dialogue. These newspaper dailies — syndicated nationally through Newspaper Feature Service — constitute the direct lineage from which comic books emerged, their recurring cast, sequential panels, and speech balloons establishing conventions still in use today.