Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip, July 22, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* began in 1912 and ran for nearly four decades, making it one of the longest-lived American newspaper strips. This four-panel daily titled "That May Be the Reason" shows Polly Perkins and a checkered-suited companion trading accusations — he insists "you did!", she counters "I didn't!" — until one calls the other "a peach of a prevaricator." The final panel delivers the punchline: "Modesty, I presume!" Sterrett's crisp cross-hatching, expressive silhouettes, and tightly timed balloon placement exemplify the visual grammar newspaper artists forged from scratch — recurring characters, sequential panels, and dialogue balloons that comic books would later inherit wholesale. Sterrett's later Sunday pages pushed into near-Cubist abstraction, but this strip shows his razor-sharp comic timing in its daily form.