Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-22

In this four-panel daily strip, Pa and Maw puzzle over son Teddie's new job: he earns "a hundred per—" but never finished the sentence. Does he mean per week, per month, per year? The punchline lands deadpan: "It's per-haps!" Sterrett draws his characters with bulbous noses, hatched plaid trousers, and expressive rubber-limbed bodies typical of his loose, art-deco-inflected draftsmanship. Launched in 1912 by the Hearst syndicate, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first newspaper strips to develop a stable domestic cast across hundreds of installments — the recurring-character serial format that editors, collectors, and eventually publishers would soon bind into proto-comic books, establishing the strip page as the direct ancestor of the American comic-book medium.