Polly and Her Pals — December 22, 1922

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the early 1920s it had become one of the most visually inventive strips in American newspapers. This daily strip follows Paw, the rotund, exasperated patriarch, who has apparently hocked everything the family owns to meet margin calls — leaving him literally coatless at Christmas. Four compact panels carry the gag cleanly: a phone call, a furious wife discovering the wedding overcoat is gone, a relieved reversal, then the punchline reveal. Sterrett's thick brushwork, expressive silhouettes, and precise timing exemplify the daily newspaper strip's economy of storytelling — the same visual grammar of sequential panels and speech balloons that publishers would soon bind into the first comic books.