Polly and Her Pals — The Power of Suggestion

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran until 1958, making it one of the longest-lived strips of the newspaper comic page's golden era. This daily strip shows Pa Perkins — Polly's rotund, henpecked father — suffering a spectacular sneezing fit after a servant announces his bath and Snappy calls the morning "elegant." Four tightly paced panels build from domestic calm to comic explosion, with Sterrett's exaggerated figures, wavy stench lines, and onomatopoeic "MQX!" doing the visual work. Pa's punch line — he stayed up till four hunting a three-letter synonym for "indisposed" — lands the gag squarely in the crossword craze of the 1920s. Sterrett's bold linework and Art Deco spatial experiments would grow increasingly abstract through the decade, influencing later cartoonists who studied his command of shape and movement.