Polly and Her Pals

Six horizontal panels follow Polly and her father Pa Perkins through a night at the opera. Pa opens by grumbling that men bear the real burden of spring-cleaning while women rest; by panel two the couple is racing to leave before the final act; midway they argue about whether to stay through five-fifteen; and the strip closes with Pa being dispatched to fetch Polly's mop and dust-pan before she'll consider the theatre again. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, eventually pushing its draftsmanship toward near-abstract Cubist patterning. These syndicated daily strips — alongside Bud Fisher's *Mutt and Jeff* and George McManus's *Bringing Up Father* — established the recurring-cast domestic comedy as newspaper comics' dominant form, and their collected reprint pamphlets became the direct commercial model for the comic book format.