Polly and Her Pals — 1925-01-26

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (Hearst syndicate, launched 1912) here puts Paw center stage in a four-panel daily. He claims a rediscovered parlor trick — performing it behind a curtain in panel three, then tumbling into chaos in panel four, admitting he hasn't practiced in forty years. Sterrett's chunky, rubber-limbed figures and stacked speech balloons are characteristic of his draftsmanship, which would grow increasingly Cubist-influenced through the late 1920s. Strips like this one — running daily and Sunday in hundreds of papers simultaneously — established the visual conventions that early comic-book publishers simply reprinted and bound: the sequential panel grid, the integrated speech balloon, the recurring cast built around domestic comedy.