Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, and it ran for four decades—one of the longest-lived newspaper strips in American history. This four-panel daily follows the familiar setup: Polly recounts a moonlit proposal scene to a friend, and the joke turns on whether her suitor knelt as he proposed. The punchline arrives in the final panel, where Ma—her perpetually scene-stealing mother—claims credit for engineering the outcome from a hammock. Sterrett's clean pen line, expressive silhouettes, and economical speech balloons show the daily strip format fully mature: recurring cast, compressed timing, visual punch on the last panel. These newspaper dailies were the direct seedbed from which the first comic books—reprinting exactly such strips—grew in the early 1930s.