Polly and Her Pals — 1922

Four panels follow Pa home after a failed errand: he was sent to buy stockings for Ma but returns empty-handed, prompting Ma's exasperation and Pa's sheepish defense — he visited every stocking shop in the city yet couldn't find a pair to fit her curves. The strip closes with Pa's rueful quip about bow-legged stockings. Clifford Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram; by the 1920s its Sunday pages had become landmarks of decorative abstraction. These daily installments, drawn in Sterrett's economical ink line with expressive silhouetted figures and tightly timed dialogue balloons, represent the newspaper comic strip at its commercial and artistic peak — the direct ancestor of the comic book format assembled just years later from exactly such syndicated pages.