Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* runs here as a four-panel daily, its header announcing the self-referential gag: "It's Impossible to Make Something of Two Nothings." The action turns on Paw — the rotund, striped-trousered patriarch — caught between outrage and logic after apparently calling Polly a liar. A second stout man, Mr. Perkins, trades bristling denials with Paw across crowded speech balloons, while Polly herself appears only in the opening panel. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already distinctive: thickly cross-hatched figures, expressive posture doing as much work as dialogue. Launched in 1912, *Polly* is among the strips whose daily and Sunday pages supplied the page layouts, recurring casts, and balloon conventions that syndicates soon reprinted as bound comics — making newspaper strips the direct structural ancestor of the comic book.