Polly and Her Pals — August 1944

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* for the New York Evening Telegram in 1912, making it one of the longest-running family comedy strips in American newspaper history. This 1944 daily shows Paw insisting on driving lessons while Ma grabs the gearshift (mistaking it for a brake), tumbles into the back seat, and the runaway car heads straight for a tree — four panels of pure slapstick escalation. Sterrett built his reputation on increasingly abstract, almost Cubist Sunday pages, but the dailies kept a looser vaudeville rhythm. The strip's panel-to-panel momentum — setup, complication, alarm, crash — is exactly the visual grammar that newspaper comic artists codified between 1900 and 1930, the same grammar Marvel and DC would inherit wholesale.