Media: Cliff Sterrett's Polly And Her Pals 1936

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 2 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about print cartoonists.

Al Capp once described Cliff Sterrett as "the finest cartoonist of them all". Yet most people have never heard of him or his strip, Polly And Her Pals.

Sterrett debuted the Polly strip in 1912. Initially, it focused on a pretty girl, but as the strip developed, Sterrett turned his attention to Polly's family- specifically, her father, known as "Paw" and her mother, referred to as "Maw". Other characters filled out the cast- Neewah, the family's houseboy; Ashur, the dimwitted nephew; and Carrie, Paw's sister in law. Shadowing Paw through the panels is Kitty, the cat.



Richard Marschall produced a pair of books documenting the Polly And Her Pals Sunday pages from 1926 to 1929. This was the prime era of the strip, with Picasso-esque cubist backgrounds and surreal gags. If you see these books for sale, grab them. By the mid-1930s, Sterrett was afflicted with arthritis, and had turned over a lot of the responsibility for the strip to his assistant, Paul Fung. Sterrett let Fung create the dailies without much input, but he supervised the Sunday pages personally, with Fung simply providing the background detail repeated from panel to panel.

Kent Butterworth brought in a stack of original Sunday pages from 1936 for us to digitize. This era of Polly And Her Pals has never been reprinted, so these delicate originals are particularly important. These oversize sheets are twice as large as the platen on our scanner, so we have to scan them in two passes and splice them together in Photoshop. With the high resolutions we're scanning art at, it takes over an hour to digitize each Sunday page. But I think you'll agree that it's well worth it.

Many thanks to Kent Butterworth for providing these great newspaper comics to us... Another example of wonderful artwork you won't see anywhere else.


January 5, 1936


January 12, 1936


February 2, 1936


February 16, 1936

For another example of Cliff Sterrett's genius, see Michael Sporn's Splog.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

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