Polly and Her Pals — 1922-09-23

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip (launched 1912) runs four panels here under the wry title *Of Course, It Was Just a Co-incidence, but*. A woman in an evening dress sets the scene — the family is having the Bishop for supper — then the table party discovers his soup spoon is missing. Accusations fly in overlapping speech balloons: was it deliberate or an oversight? The punchline lands in the final panel: last time the Bishop dined with them, they lost a soup spoon too. Sterrett's dense crosshatching, rubbery faces, and stacked dialogue show the daily strip fully mature — a self-contained comic scene delivered in inches of newsprint, the very format that would soon be collected, reprinted, and sold as the first comic books.