Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Clifford Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* ran from 1912 to 1958, making it one of the longest-lived American newspaper strips. This daily, titled "They Had Such a Pleasant Outing, too!", turns on a classic domestic misunderstanding: "The Hon. Mrs. Grouch" calls on the household, setting off a squabble between two women over who must go downstairs to greet her, while a small dog intervenes. The punchline pivots on the phrase "at dagger's points" — the visitor misreads marital hostility as a vacation. Sterrett's draftsmanship is loose and energetic, with expressive cross-hatching and overlapping speech balloons that push the panel's spatial logic. His work helped standardize the daily-strip format — four horizontal panels, recurring cast, wordplay payoff — that directly fed the anthology reprint collections publishers would soon bind into the first recognizable comic books.