Polly and Her Pals — 1922-08-16

Four panels titled *They Do Say Rolling Is Good Exercise*. A visiting doctor scolds the idle Paw Perkins; in the next panel Paw is seen rocking dramatically on a chair, insisting *I is exercisin, unk!*; then a neighbor confirms *Yas you is — y'betcha boots!*; finally Paw brags he has been *rollin' me own cigarettes ever since I saw him* — doctor's orders, technically fulfilled. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram. By 1922 his Sunday pages displayed proto-Cubist geometry and dense cross-hatching that influenced a generation of cartoonists. These syndicated daily strips — with their locked-in cast, recurring gags, and speech balloons — supplied the raw pages that early comic-book publishers reprinted and bound, making the newspaper strip the direct ancestor of the American comic book.