Polly and Her Pals — November 30, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's four-panel daily opens on Polly's mother, Maw Perkins, confronting the family's empty bank book — Paw has lost their savings dabbling in Wall Street. A visitor arrives, grandly announcing herself as wife of a pauper; Maw corrects her: she is wife of Sam Perkins, the Amalgamated Mop Magnate, who intends to 'mop up the country financially speaking.' The strip closes with Maw chasing the visitor out with an actual mop — 'literally speaking.' Sterrett's draftsmanship is precise and elastic, his panel compositions building comedic rhythm through posture and gesture. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, became one of the era's most formally inventive strips, its Sunday pages developing abstract, Art Deco-inflected backgrounds that influenced a generation of cartoonists working in the newspaper format that directly seeded the comic book.