Polly and Her Pals — 1922-09-29

In four compact panels titled *Pa Finds Out What He Wants to Know*, Pa schemes to discredit Polly's suitor — a doctor — by complaining about paying medical bills while Polly keeps company with a "quack." He storms the young man's office, stammers through an awkward consultation, and asks what a fellow gets for a sore throat. The punchline: "I don't want a sore throat!" Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, and its increasingly fractured, Cubist-influenced draftsmanship made it one of the most visually adventurous strips of the era. Daily newspaper strips like this one — tightly sequenced, speech-balloon-driven, built on recurring characters — formed the direct structural template from which comic books would emerge by the 1930s.