Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip, March 5, 1925

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and this four-panel daily shows his economical comic timing at full strength. Two older men on a park bench trade complaints about money — shingling and painting bills keep one perpetually broke — until a passerby assumes he owns the house he works on. The strip's punch lands in the final panel: he's no homeowner, just the father of a fashionably dressed daughter whose spending drives the whole joke. Sterrett's cross-hatched coats, chunky figures, and clean speech balloons represent newspaper dailies at their most refined — the syndicated strip format that, collected into pamphlets through the 1930s, directly produced the comic book as a physical object.