Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, and this daily strip—subtitled *The Young Lady Makes an Investment*—shows his characteristic domestic comedy in full stride. Six panels track a money argument across three generations: a gruff, tobacco-chewing grandfather is challenged to calculate how much he spends on tobacco yearly; a fashionable young Polly parlays that sum into justifying a real mink muff; the grandfather sputters in the final panel as Polly walks away, already wearing it. Sterrett's draftsmanship is clean and economical—expressive silhouettes, vigorous speech balloons, rhythmic panel pacing. The strip belongs to the era of Outcault, McManus, and Dirks, whose syndicated newspaper pages invented the sequential-panel conventions that comic books would inherit wholesale a generation later.