Polly and Her Pals — 8 December 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (1912–1958) was among the longest-running American newspaper strips, and this daily — titled "Business Is Picking Up" — showcases its domestic-comedy engine at full throttle. Four panels follow a mop-selling scheme gone spectacularly wrong: Pat and Polly discover their supposed head salesman has moved exactly one unit, to Aunt Susie, who storms in demanding her quarter back from the housekeeping money. Sterrett's linework is loose and kinetic, characters rubber-limbed and expressive. The strip belongs to the golden age of syndicated dailies — the newspaper page that literally invented comics' visual grammar: regularized panels, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast. Sterrett later pushed that grammar toward near-abstraction in his Sunday pages, influencing generations of cartoonists who studied his bold geometry and pattern work.