Polly and Her Pals — 1922-12-13

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran for decades in Hearst syndication, making it one of the longest-lived domestic comedy strips. This four-panel daily follows Pa — identified here as a Wall Street broker — hushing his family about a client matter, then slipping out supposedly to shop, while Ma and another woman piece together that his mysterious errand involved investigating 'Amalgamated Mops' from a steam yacht advertisement. The final panel finds Pa at the County Poor House, hat in hand. Sterrett's loose, energetic linework and stacked speech balloons show the dailies' refined shorthand: compressed staging, repeated settings, punchline-last structure — the sequential grammar that newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s and 1940s.