Polly and Her Pals — "It was a Regular Habit with Percy"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (1912–1958) is among the longest-running newspaper comic strips in American history. This daily strip runs four panels: two women gossip about Percy threatening suicide over a romantic rejection, dismissing it as routine — "he always commits suicide when any of us turns him down" — while the final panel shows Percy himself melodramatically tumbling from his chair amid scattered objects. Sterrett's draftsmanship is notably loose and expressive, his figures rubbery and kinetic. The strip exemplifies the daily newspaper format that directly fed the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s, which reprinted exactly these syndicated pages. Speech balloons, sequential panel logic, recurring cast — Sterrett and his contemporaries built the visual language that defined the medium.