Polly and Her Pals — 1922-12-14

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran until 1958, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This daily finds Pa — the strip's real comic engine — slumped in his armchair lamenting that nobody buys his mops, while a woman (likely Polly) opens with the taunt "How's the millionaire mop magnate today?" A lanky visitor proposes disguising the mops as Santa Claus whiskers for the Christmas season, and Pa's gloom lifts into scheming delight. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already assured: expressive silhouettes, loose confident linework, and speech balloons that drive panel-to-panel momentum. These syndicated dailies — distributed by Newspaper Feature Service — were the direct commercial and formal ancestors of the comic book, proving that recurring characters, sequential panels, and visual comedy could sustain a mass audience across years.