Polly and Her Pals — September 20, 1922

Four panels follow Pa through a hotel lobby where he casually hands over $10 described as 'chicken feed,' then joins the women of the family lounging beneath the palms — prompting a rapid-fire exchange about whether they've seen any palms, ending in Pa's oblivious punchline. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the early 1920s his draftsmanship was among the most sophisticated in syndication: bold black spotting, kinetic crowd scenes, and tightly timed speech-balloon rhythm. These daily and Sunday strips are the direct ancestors of the comic book — newspaper pages folded and reprinted wholesale became the first comic books of the 1930s, carrying forward the panel grammar, recurring characters, and visual shorthand that Sterrett and his contemporaries invented.