Polly and Her Pals — PO350104

Cliff Street presents a four-panel *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip titled "Dust to Dust," in which a backyard cooking scene—featuring a large steaming pot and bickering family members—builds to a punchline about a quarantine lifting at dawn. The strip's dialogue cascades through speech balloons from an insistent son to a scolding mother figure, resolving in comic deflation when the family learns their confinement has just ended. *Polly and Her Pals*, created by Cliff Sterrett in 1912 for the *New York Evening Telegram*, was among the first newspaper strips to develop a consistent cast of recurring characters. Its daily and Sunday pages were direct precursors to the comic book format, which emerged when syndicates began reprinting newspaper strips as cheap, stapled pamphlets in the early 1930s.