Polly and Her Pals — November 20, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* began in 1912 and became one of the most visually inventive strips in American newspapers. This four-panel daily, titled "Some Mystery About This," shows the household patriarch, Paw Perkins, startled by a tapping at the window — "Good Heavens!" — then chaos erupts as he scrambles for the telephone to call police, only to be deflated by Polly's dry punchline: she'd simply seen a face at the window, "not much" of one. Sterrett's loose, energetic linework and expressive figure-drawing are on full display. His later Sunday pages pushed toward near-Cubist abstraction, but even these dailies show the fluid panel rhythm and speech-balloon comedy that newspaper strips contributed directly to the emerging comic-book form.