Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-19

Four panels track a domestic standoff: Pa counsels a young man to forget a girl, Maw defends the suitor as a harmless golf enthusiast, and Polly herself lands the punchline — she'd rather play bridge than cook. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, making it one of the earliest newspaper strips built around a recurring cast of family eccentrics. Sterrett's draftsmanship here is already fluid — expressive silhouettes, energetic cross-hatching, speech balloons that drive panel-to-panel rhythm. These syndicated daily strips, collected and reprinted through the 1930s and 40s, were the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the comic book, proving that sequential panels, recurring characters, and visual comedy could sustain a mass readership across years.