Polly and Her Pals by Cliff Sterrett

Cliff Sterrett's Polly and Her Pals pioneered the modern comic strip through formal innovation. Sterrett deployed sequential panels with consistent characters—Polly, her father, and their household—to unfold gags across daily and Sunday pages. His sharp linework, precise panel borders, and dynamic figure poses established visual grammar that cartoonists still employ. The strip ran from 1912 into the 1950s, appearing in hundreds of newspapers and helping transform the Sunday funny pages into mass entertainment. Sterrett's influence extended directly into early comic books: reprints of newspaper strips like this one formed the foundation of the medium's first publications in the 1930s.