Polly and Her Pals — 1922-01-05

Four panels, black-and-white daily. A woman rushes in begging Pa to act fast: her suitor Percy has stormed off to drown himself in the river. Pa greets the news with a flat "Yeah?" then bolts outside shouting "Hey! Percy, wait!" — the punchline lands in the final panel: Pa catches Percy only to ask him to drop a letter at the post office on his way to the river. Clifford Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, making it one of the longest-running newspaper strips of the early century. Sterrett's confident brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and tight comedic timing across sequential panels exemplify exactly the visual grammar — recurring cast, speech balloons, panel-to-panel cause-and-effect — that newspaper comic pages exported directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.