Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-22

In four compact panels, the elegantly dressed Polly walks past two male acquaintances, Spike and Ash, giving them the cold shoulder. Spike shrugs it off — "I ain't surprised" — while Ash demands an explanation. Spike delivers the punchline deadpan: "I ain't got a idea in this world." The strip's title card then punctuates the joke — he spoke the truth without knowing it. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, making it one of the longest-running early American comic strips. Sterrett's increasingly angular, Art Deco-inflected draftsmanship — visible here in Polly's stylized silhouette and the men's bold stripes — pushed newspaper comic art toward genuine pictorial sophistication. These daily strips, syndicated nationally, supplied the visual grammar — recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons — that comic books would directly inherit two decades later.