IDW has announced the August 2010 publication of Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals: Complete Sunday Comics, 1925-1927 ($75).  The full color, oversize (12” x 16”), 176-page deluxe hardcover is being edited and designed by Dean Mullaney and will be published as part of IDW’s Library of American Comics.

Sterrett’s Polly, which debuted in the Hearst papers in 1912, was the first in what became a wave of comic strips about pretty girls, though by the 1920s the focus of Sterrett’s strip often shifted to members of Polly's family, especially her father (Paw).  The strip, which lasted until 1958, reached full maturity in the 1920s, especially in the color Sunday pages in which Sterrett’s penchant for adapting elements of cubism, surrealism and Art Deco reached its height.  Sterrett’s unique graphic sensibility earned Polly and Her Pals an exalted spot in the Pantheon of American comic strips next to George Herriman’s Krazy Kat.  Art Spiegelman described Polly and Her Pals as “a happy pop synthesis of Art Deco, Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, and Pure Cartoon.”

Kitchen Sink published two Polly and Her Pals collections in the early 1990s, but those vvolumes are long out of print.