Polly and Her Pals — 1922-09-26

In four tight panels titled *Just the Same, It Was a Life-Saver*, Paw is caught trying to keep an old musket rather than clear the attic. A fashionably dressed woman — almost certainly Polly — presses him for the story behind it. Paw claims the gun once saved his life: he was starving, went into the woods, and shot a deer. Punchline: he actually took it to a pawnshop and hocked it for food money. Sterrett's figures are kinetic and rubbery, his crosshatching dense, his speech balloons carefully nested in cramped domestic space. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the earliest newspaper strips to develop a consistent ensemble cast and fluid panel-to-panel staging — formal tools that daily syndication handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.