Polly and Her Pals — 1925-03-03

A four-panel daily strip by Cliff Sterrett, whose signature appears bottom-right dated Mar. 3. The gag turns on a drunk: Pa is summoned in mounting alarm — "Heavens! Where's Pa?" — then found at the door greeting a shadowy figure. The punchline reveals the man who collapsed in front of the house yesterday (and was given a restorative glass of sherry) has fallen down again. Sterrett's linework is confident and economical, his figures broadly caricatured, his staging crisp. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in the *New York Evening Telegram* in 1912, became one of the longest-running American newspaper strips, a daily and Sunday institution whose recurring cast and speech-balloon conventions helped standardize the visual grammar that newspaper syndicates would export directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.