Polly and Her Pals

Four panels track a domestic dispute over a borrowed ten dollars. Pa, seated in his armchair, demands Polly's allowance be docked for the debt; Polly, dressed in fashionable city clothes, coolly reminds him he'll wait until next month. When Pa protests he waited only *a few minutes* for repayment, Polly—exiting through the door—agrees: "I only had it five minutes at the most." Cliff Sterrett's strip, launched in 1912, was among the earliest newspaper comics to build its humor around a recurring cast with consistent personalities. Sterrett's clean cross-hatching and confident figure work reflect the daily-strip format that trained readers to follow sequential narrative—the same visual grammar that would migrate directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.