Polly and Her Pals — 1922-01-15

Clifford Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest-lived newspaper strips of its era. This daily, titled "The Work Was Yet to Begin," turns on a confidence-man's pitch to a tobacco trust: by shortening cigarettes half an inch — the portion smokers always discard — he claims to save the industry tons of tobacco. Four compact panels carry the gag from street-corner boast to boardroom audience to punchline, with Sterrett's scratchy cross-hatching and expressive figures doing the heavy lifting. Newspaper dailies like this one, syndicated nationally, established the sequential panel, the speech balloon, and the recurring cast as the foundational grammar that comic books would inherit wholesale by the late 1930s.