Polly and Her Pals — 1925-01-06

Cliff Sterrett's Polly and Her Pals ran from 1912 to 1958, making it one of the longest-lived American newspaper strips. This daily sequence features the rotund, dialect-speaking Pa Perkins wrestling with a crossword clue — a four-letter word for 'fodder' — only for a passerby named Abe to supply the answer: 'PAPA.' Four compact panels carry the gag with clean sightlines and confident brushwork; speech balloons anchor the rhythm panel to panel. Sterrett's Sunday pages grew famously experimental — Cubist patterning, Art Deco geometry — but his dailies show the spare economy that shaped the comic strip's core grammar: recurring cast, escalating setup, punched landing. Newspaper strips like this one were the direct seedbed from which the first comic books, essentially reprint anthologies, grew in the early 1930s.