Polly and Her Pals — 1921 Daily Strip

Four panels track a running gag about 'Ma' and her self-imposed silent treatment. Two men in checked suits dissect whether she has 'got a peep' out since taking up silence a week ago; they prod each other — *'and what did she say to him?'* — before the final reveal: Ma, clutching Atlantic City brochures, erupts in a wordless physical frenzy that answers everything. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate and developed one of the most graphically inventive styles in the daily strip format — expressive brushwork, compressed pantomime, and speech balloons that carry comic rhythm as surely as the drawings. Sterrett's dailies belong to the generation of newspaper strips that handed cartoonists the visual vocabulary panels and recurring characters still run on today.