Polly and Her Pals — 1925-01-30

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the mid-1920s it had become one of the most formally adventurous strips in American newspapers. This daily shows the family's formidable matriarch, Maw, reacting with escalating horror as Pa reveals his parlor trick: ear-wiggling. The four panels build a tight comic rhythm — alarm, demonstration, rueful admiration, threat — entirely through speech balloons and expressive body language. Sterrett's draftsmanship is loose and rubbery, with figures that stretch and compress to mirror emotion. Such newspaper dailies were the direct ancestors of the comic book: the panel grid, recurring cast, and balloon-driven dialogue invented here were simply repackaged as newsstand pamphlets by the late 1930s.