Polly and Her Pals — 1925-02-26

In this four-panel daily strip, Aunt Maggie drags her niece Polly before Judge Eppstein to sue a Mr. Pecan for breach of promise. The punchline lands in the final panel: Maggie's grounds are that she promised *herself* she'd marry him — and he never asked. Cliff Sterrett drew *Polly and Her Pals* from 1912 until 1958, making it one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. His draftsmanship here is assured and economical — expressive silhouettes, varied panel staging, speech balloons that manage overlapping voices cleanly. Strips like this one were the direct precursor to the comic book format: when publishers began reprinting newspaper dailies as pamphlets in the early 1930s, they were assembling a visual grammar Sterrett and his contemporaries had already perfected.