Polly and Her Pals — 1922-08-05

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip, titled here "Pa Has the Original Radio," runs four panels: Pa, slumped in his chair with a fishing rod, ignores a knock at the door while trading excuses with an unseen family member about who should answer it. A door-to-door salesman then pitches a "lil radio outfit" promising globe-spanning gossip for a dollar. Pa boots him out, declaring the gadget unnecessary — he already has a wife and daughter. Sterrett launched *Polly* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, making it one of American newspapers' longest-running domestic comedy strips. Its bold Art Deco linework and compressed panel rhythms exemplify how syndicated dailies forged the visual grammar — recurring characters, speech balloons, sequential causality — that directly seeded the comic-book format emerging in the 1930s.