Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-06

Four panels follow Ashur, the household's eccentric patriarch, as he receives doctor's orders to take up a wind instrument for his chest. His wife relays the prescription; Ashur demands to know what instrument and why; the answer — to develop his lungs — lands with comic timing. The final panel reveals him already red-faced and gleeful at an accordion, announcing he feels better already. Sterrett's linework is loose and rubbery, characters built from elastic curves and exaggerated posture. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram* and became one of the longest-running newspaper strips, its daily and Sunday pages part of the syndicated print ecosystem that directly seeded the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s.