Polly and Her Pals — 1922-08-04

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* — headlined here "It Is Evident that Pa'll Soon Reach the End of His Rope" — shows Pa and the family on a beach outing gone sideways. In four tight panels, Pa bristles at loafing young men, a nervous young woman wishes they'd leave, two mustachioed bystanders egg the confrontation on, and the strip closes with a gag about Pa's walrus whiskers preventing him from smoking a full cigar. Sterrett's linework is dense and kinetic, the speech balloons phonetically spelling out vernacular speech. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly* was among the longest-running early strips, its recurring cast and weekly rhythm establishing the narrative conventions — panel grids, expressive caricature, cliffhanger punchlines — that newspaper syndicates would package into the first comic books by the 1930s.