Polly and Her Pals — September 15, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 as one of the earliest recurring-character newspaper strips, helping establish the domestic-comedy daily as a commercial staple. This four-panel strip — titled "The Cook Gives Plain Warning" — follows Paw fumbling through a dinner crisis after the cook quits without notice. Sterrett's draftsmanship is distinctive: loosely cross-hatched figures, expressive silhouettes, and tightly timed dialogue across panels that build to Paw's rueful punchline about indigestion tablets. The strip exemplifies how Hearst and Syndicate dailies of the 1910s–20s refined the visual grammar — panel gutters, integrated speech balloons, sequential cause-and-effect — that would directly scaffold the first comic books of the 1930s, which were literally reprinted newspaper strips bound between covers.