Polly and Her Pals — September 28, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the most formally inventive strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily — titled "All It Needed Was a Start" — opens with a woman shrieking "I hate you!" at a cringing man, draws in a moralizing neighbor who lectures the couple on quarreling, then pivots to the punchline: the pair cheerfully agree they've had only one quarrel across twenty-five years of marriage, before conceding it has been "occasionally interrupted." Sterrett's chunky, expressive figures, dense crosshatching, and stacked speech balloons demonstrate exactly the visual grammar — sequential panels, contained dialogue, comedic beat-and-reveal — that newspaper syndication would hand directly to the comic book format emerging in the 1930s.