Polly and Her Pals — "Birds of a Feather Don't Always Flock Together"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip pivots here on a single running gag: Uncle Sam'l learns that Pete Pipp was born in the Canary Islands, immediately assumes canaries sing, and gets a shoe flung at him for demanding a demonstration. Four compact panels track the misunderstanding through stiff handshakes and mounting confusion, rendered in Sterrett's clean ink line with expressive silhouettes and brisk, colloquial balloon lettering. Launched in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, *Polly* was among the first strips to build comedy around a fixed family ensemble rather than a single protagonist — a structural innovation that newspaper syndicates would carry directly into the early comic-book reprint format of the 1930s.