Polly and Her Pals — "But She Still Has Some Blank Checks Left"

Clifford Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip follows Miss Perkms, who shrugs off her bank's overdraft notices and strolls into a charge-account office. The banker welcomes her warmly, asks for a bank reference, receives a cheerful "Of course!" — then warns her it will prove "a bitter disappointment." Four tight panels; Sterrett's loose, art-nouveau-inflected line animates the gag through posture alone. Launched in 1912, *Polly* was among the earliest newspaper strips to center a young woman protagonist alongside a large ensemble cast. Sterrett pioneered bold geometric abstraction in Sunday color pages, influencing a generation of cartoonists. These syndicated dailies — distributed by Newspaper Feature Service — are the direct ancestors of the collected comic book format that emerged in the 1930s.