Polly and Her Pals — 16 September 1928

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* ran in American newspapers from 1912 to 1958, becoming one of the longest-lived comic strips of its era. This daily shows Ma — the strip's true comic engine — navigating a bridge-game dilemma: she knows Maggie is a rotten player, admits she couldn't help asking her anyway, then in the final panel resolves the whole mess by retreating to the piano. Four tightly paced panels, expressive rubbery figures, and sharp vernacular dialogue carry the joke without a wasted line. Sterrett pioneered bold graphic abstraction in his Sunday pages, but his dailies prove equally disciplined. Strips like this one, syndicated nationally by Newspaper Feature Service, were the direct raw material that 1930s publishers began reprinting as the first comic books.