Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-23

Four panels track a domestic comedy: a stooped old man insists he 'ain't' something while Polly and a tall, elegantly dressed companion dismiss him; a small figure asks Pa what became of lounge-lizards; the dandy declares himself a 'Finale-Hopper'; and Pa chases him off with the threat that 'the hoppin's healthy.' Sterrett's line is loose and rubbery, bodies exaggerated into comic springs. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first daily strips to center a named female character. These syndicated newspaper dailies — cheap, mass-reproduced, built on recurring casts and sequential panels — directly seeded the comic-book format that coalesced by the late 1930s.