Polly and Her Pals — March 13, 1922

Four panels track Polly skating with a crowd of male admirers while her parents watch from the sidelines. Her father exclaims at the mob; her mother identifies the group as Polly's pals. Two bystanders in the third panel marvel that she 'suttinly does love winter sports'; the punchline lands in the fourth: she's engaged to eight of them. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, making it one of the longest-running early comic strips. His draftsmanship grew increasingly geometric and avant-garde through the 1920s–30s, absorbing Cubist influence rare in newspaper comics. The strip exemplifies how syndicated dailies and Sunday pages — not magazines — first standardized recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons as the visual language later inherited by the comic book form.