Polly and Her Pals — 1922-01-20

Four panels, titled *Pa's All Talked Out By Dinner Time*. Pa Perkins flatly refuses to give an after-dinner speech; his wife and daughter Hattie cajole him at the door of a neighbor, Mrs. Perkins confirms he is a fine after-dinner speaker, and the strip lands its punch when Hattie dryly notes you ought to hear him before breakfast. Sterrett's draftsmanship is fluid and eccentric — rubbery figures, energetic cross-hatching, expressive hands. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the earliest newspaper strips to sustain a recurring cast across years of dailies and Sunday pages. Those syndicated pages, reproduced and bundled by publishers through the 1930s, directly seeded the comic-book format, carrying forward the panel-and-balloon grammar pioneered by Outcault and McManus into a new mass medium.