Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-19

Four panels track a domestic money dispute: Ma insists every woman should have a joint bank account she can sign herself; Pa, hat in hand, shuffles to the manager's office at DeForest Hill Bank to open what he calls a "put an' take" account. The banker echoes the phrase with enthusiasm; the final panel reveals the punchline — Polly tartly explains that Ma does the *taking*. Cliff Sterrett's linework is spare and elastic, his figures rubbery caricatures held together by confident brushwork. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram* and ran nearly four decades — one of the long-form daily strips whose accumulated panels, recurring cast, and sequential gag logic laid the structural groundwork that comic books would inherit wholesale.