Polly and Her Pals — "All Dressed Up—And No Place to Go!"

Cliff Sterrett's Polly and Her Pals (King Features Syndicate, launched 1912) runs four panels here, each dense with overlapping figures and rapid-fire dialect storytelling. A large, shirtless man is shushed mid-anecdote in panel one; panels two and three pack barbershop crowds and an open automobile around a top-hatted dandy; the final panel erupts into a mob of kids joshing over nicknames. Sterrett's linework is muscular and kinetic, characteristic of the syndicated daily strip that directly fed the first comic book reprints of the 1930s. Those reprint anthologies — Famous Funnies chief among them — were assembled almost entirely from newspaper strips like this one, making Sterrett and his peers the unwitting architects of an entirely new print medium.