Polly and Her Pals — 1922-07-01

A four-panel daily strip by Cliff Sterrett, syndicated through Newspaper Feature Service. The gag turns on a cuckoo clock sold with the promise it would wake the cook without disturbing the family — it wakes the entire household instead. Panel one shows the family in uproar shouting "Absurd!" "Ridiculous!" "Outrageous!"; panels two and three move to a shop counter where the buyer demands his money back; the punchline lands in panel four. Sterrett's clean ink line, expressive silhouettes, and efficiently placed speech balloons show the daily strip's mature grammar fully formed. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first newspaper comics to center a recurring cast in domestic comedy, and Sterrett would later push the strip toward bold geometric abstraction — making it a pivotal document in sequential art's visual evolution.