Polly and Her Pals — January 18, 1922

In four tightly paced panels, a woman alerts the household to a burglar in Patricia's room; a child confronts the striped-suited intruder; the girl disarms him by recognizing him from the zoo the previous day—*without his clothes on*—sending him into a faint; and Polly rushes in calling for smelling salts. Sterrett's draftsmanship is fluid and expressive, with bold silhouette, confident cross-hatching, and speech balloons that carry the comic timing entirely. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, is among the longest-running newspaper strips and an exemplar of the daily comic's evolution from single-panel gag to multi-panel narrative—the sequential grammar that would directly seed the comic book format two decades later.