Polly and Her Pals — August 29, 1922

In this four-panel daily strip titled *Pa Has Nothing to Say About It*, Pa Perkins receives his next-week schedule from a boss, then encounters two women who have already made up their minds—presumably about the same schedule. Meeting a friend on the street, Pa admits he has made no vacation plans, and the final panel delivers the gag: his boss tells him when to go, his family tells him where. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram; its domestic comedy, elastic figure-drawing, and eventual geometric Art Deco backgrounds made it one of the most visually inventive newspaper strips of its era. Such syndicated dailies and Sunday pages—speech balloons, sequential panels, recurring cast—directly supplied the raw material reprinted in the first true comic books of the 1930s.