Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-15

Four panels track a domestic exchange: a lanky, fashionable Polly questions a rumpled, wide-eyed Pa about whether he has seen the milliner's bill. He denies it; she presses; he claims certainty; the final panel reveals him slack-jawed with shock as a cat scrambles away and musical-note sound effects float overhead — the title's promised tune-change arriving in pantomime. Sterrett's line is angular and energetic, his figures exaggerated into rubber-limbed types that prefigure later animation. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran for decades, pioneering the recurring cast and domestic-comedy strip format. These syndicated newspaper dailies were the direct seedbed of the comic book: their panels, speech balloons, and sequential grammar were simply repackaged as anthologies beginning in the 1930s, making strips like this the literal prototype of the medium.