Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* ran from 1912 to 1958, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily shows Paw and Polly in a familiar domestic exchange: Polly reports that Tommy is grateful for the ten dollars Paw lent him, swears he'll never forget it, and intends to prove his appreciation — by coming straight to Paw next time he's broke. The punchline lands on Paw's exasperated collapse. Sterrett drew in a loose, expressive pen line with cross-hatched plaid trousers and exaggerated silhouettes that influenced a generation of cartoonists. His Sunday pages later pushed into near-abstract Cubist patterning, extraordinary for a comic strip. Newspaper dailies like this one, syndicated nationally, directly seeded the anthology reprint format that became the comic book.