Polly and Her Pals — "Pa Never Gets the Chance to Try It"

Four panels follow the strip's recurring male characters commiserating about the impossibility of living within one's income — a shared grievance that ends with the punchline confession: "My wimmin-folks won't let me!" Sterrett draws in a loose, angular style with expressive hats, striped trousers, and fluid body language carrying comic timing across each panel. Though Polly herself barely appears, her absence is the joke. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the early 1920s his work exemplified the daily newspaper strip's fully developed grammar — recurring cast, recurring themes, speech balloons precisely placed, rhythm built through sequential panels. These syndicated dailies and Sunday pages, printed in millions of homes, are the direct material ancestors of the comic book format.