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 syndication. This four-panel daily — headlined *"Who Said Neewah Had Quit?"* — turns on a domestic reversal: the household cook Neewah has defected to the neighbors (the "Doughbags"), and Pa is left serving a comically meager half-ham platter, announcing "Folks, EATS!" with hapless bravado. Sterrett's draftsmanship is precise and energetic; his figures gesticulate broadly, speech balloons carry phonetic dialect, and the panel-to-panel rhythm is crisp. Newspaper dailies like this one — syndicated nationwide, read by millions — established the sequential grammar that comic books would inherit wholesale a decade later.