Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-01

Four panels track a domestic argument: Polly asks Pa whether he has heard Harold's latest poem; Pa dismisses Harold as a roughneck; Ma defends Harold, insisting Pa ought to hear him read his *Ode to a Firefly*; the strip ends with Pa thunderstruck, demanding how Harold got a firefly to listen. Sterrett's linework is fluid and economical — exaggerated postures, expressive mouths, hats deployed as character shorthand. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the earliest newspaper strips to center a recurring cast around domestic comedy and to experiment boldly with Art Deco geometry in its Sunday pages. Daily strips like this one refined the grammar of sequential art — timed beats, balloon placement, visual punch lines — that directly fed the first comic-book anthologies of the 1930s.