Polly and Her Pals — June 17, 1925

Four panels open with a crash off-panel—a question mark floating above a startled seated figure—then pivot to a young man mortified over a destroyed straw hat, consoled by an older woman who cheerfully reveals it wasn't her best hat anyway. The final panel shows a third figure, the hat's actual owner, taking a pie-tin to the face. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* for Hearst's King Features in 1912, making it one of the longest-running American newspaper strips. Sterrett's draftsmanship grew increasingly geometric and Cubist-influenced through the 1920s, though these daily strips retain his loose, rubbery character work. The strip's recurring domestic ensemble—anchored by the perpetually sidelined Polly—helped establish the newspaper daily as a format for serialized character comedy that would directly seed the first comic book reprint collections of the 1930s.