Polly and Her Pals — c. 1925

Four panels of domestic sparring: Polly's mother scolds Paw Perkins for buying useless junk; Paw retorts that he can spend his own money; Ma calls him an extravagant fool; Paw fires back that *he* never made a useless purchase — until Ma produces the fire extinguisher he bought five years ago and never once used. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, making it one of America's longest-running comic strips. His later Sunday pages pushed Art Deco geometry and near-abstract backgrounds to remarkable extremes, but the daily strips like this one rely on tight verbal comedy and expressive character drawing. Sterrett's recurring cast of bickering domestics helped establish the newspaper strip's defining format: compressed narrative, speech balloons driving plot, and a punchline locked into the final panel.