Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the most visually inventive strips in American newspaper history. This daily, titled "The Mystery Gets Deeper," follows a comic-thriller vein: two characters stake out a suspect's den, creeping panel by panel through increasingly tense close quarters before a door clicks shut and someone inside curses their presence. Sterrett's draftsmanship is confident and elastic — exaggerated body language, expressive speech balloons, and crisp panel transitions carry the gag's rhythm without a wasted line. The strip exemplifies how newspaper dailies of the 1910s–20s forged the visual conventions — sequential panels, integrated dialogue, recurring casts — that comic books would inherit wholesale a decade later.