Polly and Her Pals — 1925-01-21

Four panels track a domestic argument in the Perkins household: a young man defends crossword puzzles to a grumbling elder, a stylish Polly announces the parents are off to a lecture, the boy pleads exhaustion from a late-night puzzle session, and Paw — sporting whiskers and a nightcap — concedes the point with a handshake. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, making it one of the longest-running family strips in American newspaper history. His bold brushwork, decorative patterning, and fluid staging were formative influences on the visual syntax — recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons carrying character voice — that newspaper comic strips codified and that early comic books would soon inherit wholesale.