Polly and Her Pals — "There's Just One Thing Pa Wants to Know"

Five panels track a hair-raising automobile ride: Pa is reassured that Harry is a wonderful driver, demands to be let out, is told by Mr. Perkins there's no need for alarm, watches the car hurtle through clouds of dust and chaos at full speed, and finally surfaces from the wreckage asking, "Any putticular side up?" Sterrett's draftsmanship is loose and kinetic — speed rendered as billowing dust, dialogue phonetically spelled for comic timing. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, was among the first strips to develop a stable cast of recurring characters across years of daily and Sunday pages — exactly the serialized, panel-by-panel visual storytelling that would directly seed the comic book format two decades later.