Polly and Her Pals — October 18, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the most visually inventive strips in American newspaper syndication. This daily follows a recurring gag structure: a man asks whether someone can find a phone number, is passed through a chain of increasingly flustered characters, and the punchline lands on a single word — *Money!* — delivered with comic-strip timing perfected across five tight panels. Sterrett's draftsmanship is confident; his figures rubbery and expressive, his compositions dense with cross-hatching and kinetic body language. Daily strips like this one — cheap, mass-printed, cut and collected — directly seeded the first comic books, which were initially just reprinted newspaper pages. The speech balloon, the recurring cast, the six-panel joke architecture: Sterrett and his peers invented all of it.