Polly and Her Pals

Clifford Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip opens with a boy clutching his stomach while a woman scolds a man not to mock the child, promising he'll be a famous musician. Panels two and three reveal the boy sprawled dramatically in a chair, gasping that it's "work! work! work!" killing him — not illness. The final panel lands the punchline: he hasn't started practicing yet; he starts tomorrow. Sterrett's loose, angular linework and overlapping speech balloons show the visual grammar newspaper strips were cementing by 1922 — the same grammar that would migrate directly into the first comic books of the 1930s, which were simply reprinted newspaper pages folded and stapled. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, was among the daily strips teaching readers worldwide to move left-to-right through sequential panels as natural as reading prose.