Polly and Her Pals — 1922-12-06

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by 1922 it had become one of the most visually inventive strips in American newspapers. This daily — headlined *They Haven't Started to Mop Up Yet* — runs four panels: two rotund schemers pitch incorporating "Amalgamated Mops" for a million, then a billion; a woman asks her father for a quarter for the gas meter; the men plead total poverty; and a final panel has one of them erupting at being compared to mere "financiers" when they deal in billions. Sterrett's dense cross-hatching, rubbery figures, and overlapping speech balloons exemplify the visual grammar newspaper artists were still codifying — the same daily and Sunday pages whose collected reprints gave the nascent comic-book format its name and form.