Polly and Her Pals

Clifford Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip runs four panels: Pa and a young woman observe new upstairs neighbors; Pa doubts their housekeeping; she lists the proof — no vacuum cleaner, no electric iron, no percolator; the kicker lands when Pa admits he knows because he tried to borrow them all, earning a pratfall exit. The strip, launched in 1912, is built on the comic mismatch between Pa's bumbling nosiness and his daughter Polly's modern sensibility. Sterrett's draftsmanship — bold outlines, expressive cartooning, inventive compositions — influenced a generation of cartoonists. Newspaper syndicated dailies like this one were the direct ancestors of the comic book: they standardized panel sequences, speech balloons, and recurring cast, establishing the visual grammar that the comic book format simply collected and bound.