Polly and Her Pals — 1922-09-25

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the early 1920s its domestic comedy had sharpened into something formally daring. This four-panel daily follows Paw Perkins through a familiar arc: he flings down his newspaper in disgust at sappy fiction, demands something hair-raising and blood-curdling, and is cheerfully promised — his milliner's bill. Sterrett's draftsmanship is bold and angular; Paw's mushroom-cap silhouette dominates each panel while Polly and Ma register reactions in crisp gestural shorthand. The speech balloons spiral with phonetic emphasis (*S'MATTER?*, *BAH!*), demonstrating the expressive typography newspaper artists pioneered. These syndicated daily strips, running alongside Sunday pages across hundreds of papers, assembled the visual grammar — recurring characters, sequential panels, integrated word and image — that would directly seed the first comic books of the 1930s.