Polly and Her Pals — 1925-02-21

Four panels follow a piece of neighborhood gossip: a curly-haired woman passes in the street, and two gabbing acquaintances report she sent her best dress to be pressed because she's "going to be married again." A third, taller woman corrects them — Miss Pipp has never actually *been* married — prompting the punchline that she has often been "going to be." Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for King Features, making it one of the longest-running early newspaper strips. Sterrett pioneered decorative Art Deco backgrounds and expressive ink work that pushed daily comics toward fine-art abstraction. These syndicated daily strips, reproduced and bound by hand, were the direct precursors of the comic book as a physical format.