Polly Come Lately

Tuesday Comic Strip day.

I love the psychedelic art of Cliff Sterrett's Polly and her Pals and like every collector I have always been bothered by the fact that the 'good pages' only lasted from the late twenties into the early thirties. The strip itself ran until the late fifties (or even later), but because of bad health and other problems Sterrett had to leave the art to assistants and apparently it never was as good as in the early years. Or so the story goes. But after I saw a couple of equally good pages on Paul Tumey's Screwball blog and facebook page, I knew I had to keep an eye out for more. I recently found got these Sunday pages from 1937 - a time when either Sterrett did a couple of his own again or part of a longer, forgotten resurrection? I like them anyway.

It's Been Surreal

Tuesday Comic Strip Days.

Dean Mullany has produced three reprints of Polly and her Pals at IDW. Two books collecting the color Sundays between 1925 and 1927 and 1928 and 1930. The first one also includes a sampling of the earliest pages from 1913 to 1924. There is also a book collecting the dailies of 1933. Mos reprints only go for the few 'surrealistic' years, but Mullany goes beyond that. A complete reprint of the strip (which ran for more than forty years) would probably be impossible and even boring, because it took Cliff Sterret a while to find his form and after the 'surrealistic' years he seems to have settled for a much less adventurous approach (but not completely, as flashes of his brilliance as a designer turn up every now and again). So dont let me post be udnerstood as a sort of critique of these excellent books. They are merely an addition, filling in the gaps. Here are a couple of very early Sundays I scanned from my own collection along with a set of dailies I found online.

Polly Was A Cracker

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

If there is one cartoonist I would love to read a well researched bio about, it's Cliff Sterrett. Eventhough his strip Polly and her Pals was never a major hit with the wider audience, the three to four years het did betwen 1920 and 1924 have always impressed the fans and connaisseurs. But the strip existed years before that and ran way after (starting in 1912 and ending in 1958). How come such a remarkable strip in it's early years could become so unremarkable and commonplace in later years and still run for so long. Was it Sterrett who dropped the ball, or was his influence so big that he outlived his own style? Anyway, the selective interest in his work means that his early and later years are rarely seen. So here is an early Sunday I scanned and some of the later dailies from the forties (when Sterrett may not even have done them himself).

Polly Needs A Cracker

Tuesday Comic Strip Day.

Polly and her Pals is best know for it's surrealistic style of the erly twenties, but the strip went on for a long long time. Towards the end it got quite dull, but the middle years were not as bad as you might have been led to believe.

I don't know what happened with the uploads, but if you click the larger images they become manageble.