Polly and Her Pals — "Even a Cold Can Be a Convenience"

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by 1922 it had become one of the most visually inventive strips in American papers. This daily traces a simple comic logic across four panels: Pa Perkins, suffering a head cold, can neither smell nor taste — a handicap that proves unexpectedly useful when pressed into smoking a gift of spectacularly bad cigars. Sterrett's draftsmanship is loose and kinetic, figures leaning and lurching through cluttered domestic space. Speech balloons carry exaggerated vernacular spelling that drives the timing. Newspaper strips like this one — syndicated coast to coast — directly supplied the page formats, panel grammar, and recurring-character conventions that 1930s comic book publishers simply reprinted and then imitated wholesale.