Polly and Her Pals — 1922-07-29

In this four-panel daily strip, a beach scene unfolds in Cliff Sterrett's spare, angular line work. A man approaches a reclining woman, too self-conscious to ask a direct question; she hints she needs money 'something awful'; he admits he has no idea where he'll get it; she surfaces from the water to confess she feared he'd try to borrow *her* idea of borrowing. The gag turns on mutual broke-ness and comic deflation. Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, and it ran until 1958 — among the longest newspaper strip runs on record. Such syndicated dailies were the direct precursor to comic books: their panel grids, speech balloons, and recurring cast were the visual grammar that anthology reprint comics of the 1930s would inherit wholesale.