Polly and Her Pals — February 21, 1922

Four panels follow the round, striped-suited Paw ("Mr. Coot") as he calls on Miss Polly Perkins, is told she's out, dictates a message to the maid, repeats his instruction so many times that the flustered servant finally crashes through the door in a slapstick rush to deliver it. Sterrett's draftsmanship is unusually sophisticated — sinuous Art Nouveau linework and expressive distortion long before such devices became standard cartooning grammar. Launched in 1912 by King Features, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first newspaper strips to foreground a recurring domestic ensemble and exploit the daily/Sunday page format as a vehicle for sustained character comedy. Those syndicated pages — not pulp reprints — are the true laboratory where panel sequencing, speech balloons, and visual timing were first systematically developed.