Polly and Her Pals — 1925-06-23

Four panels follow Pa Perkins, the round, excitable patriarch of Cliff Sterrett's long-running domestic strip, as he announces a golf outing, gets interrupted mid-sentence by the harried Susie, then discovers his clubs missing — only to find he has been using them to stake his rose bushes. Sterrett's loose, energetic linework gives every figure rubbery momentum; speech balloons crowd the panels with phonetic dialect that was standard newspaper vernacular of the era. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly and Her Pals* ran until 1958, making it one of the longest daily strips of the pioneer period. Its domestic situation comedy — squabbling family, thwarted plans, punchline reversal — was a template newspaper syndicates repeated for decades, and the daily strip format itself was the direct seedbed from which the first comic books, reprinting just such pages, grew in the early 1930s.