Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Four panels follow Pa and Polly at a restaurant where a large, tuxedoed waiter recites the bill — "Ten! Twenty! Thirty!" — while Pa grows increasingly alarmed, ultimately crying "Great guns! Did we eat a waiter?" Sterrett's linework is confident and elastic: exaggerated silhouettes, kinetic postures, and speech balloons that carry distinct vocal rhythms for each character. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, ran for decades and earned Sterrett a reputation as one of the medium's most formally inventive cartoonists — his later Sunday pages pushed toward near-abstract Art Deco composition. Daily strips like this one were the commercial engine behind the newspaper comics page, the direct ancestor of the comic book format that would emerge by the late 1930s.