Polly and Her Pals — 16 December 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (launched 1912) is represented here by a four-panel daily in which Pa reads alarming financial news—'Amalgamated Mops' has dropped to eighty—and announces the family is 'wiped out' unless someone produces $1,000. The large, formidable Maggie confronts him across successive panels, her bulk dominating the frame; Pa's breezy confidence ('Jess you wait'll my ship comes in') ends with him tumbled flat. Sterrett's draftsmanship is among the most sophisticated of the newspaper strip era: bold silhouettes, compressed staging, and economical speech balloons that drive comic timing panel to panel. These syndicated dailies and Sunday pages—distributed by Newspaper Feature Service—are the direct structural ancestors of the comic book, establishing the visual grammar of sequential art still in use today.