Polly and Her Pals — 1922-03-31

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 as one of the first newspaper strips built around a recurring female protagonist. This daily strip — headlined *'It May Be For Flies, But Pa Feels He's a Goat'* — runs five panels. Pa identifies a white powder; a child says 'Bakin' Soda'; Polly corrects him with breezy confidence; Pa digs in regardless, insisting 'It's fly-poison!' Sterrett's draftsmanship is already assured: angular figures, expressive silhouettes, clean speech balloons anchored firmly to speakers. Newspaper dailies like this one were the direct ancestors of the comic book — syndicates packaging recurring characters, sequential panels, and vernacular dialogue into a visual grammar that anthology reprint books would formalize by the late 1930s.