Polly and Her Pals — 1925-03-18

Four panels follow the domestic sparring of a household anticipating Pa's return: Polly asks Ma about a new hat; Ma hedges on Pa's mood; Pa bursts in bellowing about cabbage fumes and hat-rack crowding; then demands his missing slippers. The strip closes with a dry reversal — Polly advises trimming the old hat rather than buying new. Sterrett's draftsmanship is loose and expressive, with bulbous figures, lively speech balloons, and sharp comic timing built entirely through sequential image and text. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, is among the earliest recurring-cast newspaper strips, and its daily format — the true seedbed from which comic books grew — helped fix the visual grammar of American sequential art.