Polly and Her Pals — "It All Looks the Same"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912, making it one of the longest-running continuity strips of the early newspaper era. This four-panel daily shows Paw Perkins escorted into what he suspects is a jazz palace, advised by a waiter to speak with the boss, then confronted by a dance-hall enforcer who ejects him mid-tango — leaving a woman collapsed on the floor as Paw announces her fainted. Sterrett's draftsmanship is kinetic and confident: exaggerated postures, reactive crowd figures in middleground, and speech balloons that drive comic timing across panels. The strip exemplifies how newspaper dailies — not later pamphlets — built the visual grammar of sequential art: recurring cast, panel-to-panel causality, and character expression doing narrative work.