Polly and Her Pals — 1925-02-18

In this four-panel daily, the family dog terrorizes visitor Julia Featherhead's own dog, Mr. Perkins. Paw reads his paper obliviously while the animals brawl; Julia's solution—let Mr. Perkins bite the attacker once so she can scold him into understanding—lands as the strip's dry punchline, announced in the subtitle: *Otherwise, the Dog Wouldn't Understand*. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, making it one of the earliest recurring-character domestic comedy strips. Sterrett's clean linework and precise timing across panels exemplify the visual grammar—sequential action, speech balloons anchoring voice to figure—that newspaper comic artists were codifying in these years, directly anticipating the anthology comic books that would reprint such strips from the mid-1930s onward.