Polly and Her Pals — February 27, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's daily strip follows Pa and Polly dining out as a raucous restaurant orchestra plays — 'BLAH! BAM! ZING!' Pa grumbles 'Awful!', excuses himself, then boldly asks the band whether they play by request. They cheerfully oblige anything. His punchline: would they play pinochle while he eats? The four panels flow left to right through mounting absurdity, Sterrett's angular figures and energetic sound-effect lettering animating the joke. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched 1912 in the Hearst papers, was among the earliest strips to center a young woman as nominal lead while letting a scene-stealing parent carry the comedy. Sterrett would later pioneer near-abstract Art Deco backgrounds; even in this relatively straightforward daily, his draftsmanship and comic timing show the newspaper strip maturing into the storytelling form that directly seeded the comic book industry.