LOAC Essentials Volume 3: Polly and Her Pals

LOAC Essentials #3

by Cliff Sterrett, Dean Mullaney (Editor)

By the early 1930s, Cliff Sterrett had transformed Polly and Her Pals into the world's premier surrealistic comic strip. Polly debuted in 1912 as one of the earliest "pretty girl" strips, but it was in 1925 that Sterrett entered his peak period, developing a new style replete with Art Deco decorations, abstract backgrounds, and distinctive surreal perspectives -- all within the context of a down-right hilarious situation comedy. Sterrett's Sunday pages (also being published by The Library of American Comics) have long been hailed as individual masterpieces, but his daily strips -- due to their rarity -- have eluded archivists for the past ninety years. The discovery by The Library of American Comics of syndicate proofs for some early 1930s dailies -- plus new information about Sterrett's involvement with a Maine-based artist colony -- fills a major hole in comics history. The strips reprinted here -- the complete year of 1933 dailies -- show Sterrett at his most inventive, building gags upon gags within one- and two-week continuities, culminating in a spectacular holiday story in which the entire cast -- Polly, Maw and Paw Perkins, cousin Ashur, Neewah, and the rest of the outrageous Perkins household -- is transfigured into living, breathing Christmas dolls.

Genres: Comic Strips, Humor, Comics

336 pages, Hardcover

First published August 13, 2013

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

LOAC Essentials Volume 3: Polly and Her Pals collects all the daily Polly and her Pals strips from 1933.

I first encountered Cliff Sterrett and the Polly and her Pals strip in that Smithsonian Newspaper Comics collection I read a while back. This was fairly cheap and seemed like a good way to read a whole bunch of the strips.

So this is good shit. Cliff Sterrett has a surreal bend to his art at times which adds to the comedy of the strip. While it's a gag a day comic, the stories link together into two week arcs, like Paw buying a new suit or a car and dealing with the fallout. There's also the extended arc of Polly's family moving to a farm with two week arcs within that.

There's some casual 1930s racism that you'll need to overlook but this is a hilarious collection. I gather that Polly was the star at the beginning but pretty much everything in this volume revolves around her Paw, aka Sam. I'm guessing it's like when the Simpsons writers decided Homer was the best character to write for instead of Bart.

Four out of five stars. I'm glad I have the two color Sunday volumes on the way.

[Isidore · Rating 3 out of 5]

The greatness claimed for Polly and Her Pals has always puzzled me.

Yes, the art is wonderful, 40% art deco, 40% "early comic book vernacular" (a term I just made up) and 20% Expressionism (Sterrett's streetscapes look the same as those in Nosferatu).

So, it's always great to look at, especially in the spectacular Sunday strips, but also in these much less adventurous dailies.

The trouble is, the content is so dull: rudimentary plots, hoary gags, and non-existent characterization. No ingenious wordplay, no edginess, no surprises. In this collection, to justify the "surrealist hilarity" blurb on the cover, we have a sequence in which Santa Claus transforms the cast of the strip into toys. It's visually striking, but Sterrett goes nowhere in particular with it. And it is the highlight of the year.

There's nothing to hold onto after you have read the book. But you can always go back and enjoy the sheer exuberance of the art.