Polly and Her Pals — 1922-10-27

Four panels, black ink, titled *Burglars Sometimes Do Give 'Quarter'*: a flustered woman, the mustachioed Paw, and the strip's resident comic animal trade escalating revelations about a midnight burglary — climaxing when the intruder, it turns out, left a quarter. Sterrett's draftsmanship is bold and economical, his speech balloons tightly integrated into the compositions. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the earliest newspaper dailies to develop a true ensemble cast around a recurring domestic household. The American newspaper strip — syndicated, daily, sequential — is where the visual grammar of comics was forged: the panel grid, the speech balloon, the recurring character whose readers tracked across months and years. Sterrett was one of its most inventive practitioners.