Polly and Her Pals — January 28, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily opens with Polly bargaining with her father Paw — she'll coax Ma into letting him out tonight if he buys her a hat — then cuts to a returning Paw being reminded of a milliner's appointment, and closes with the men raising repeated toasts until they're sprawled flat, the final balloon reading "Eat, drink an' be merry for tomorrow, not so good." Sterrett's draftsmanship is crisp and economical: expressive silhouettes, confident brushwork, and tightly timed panel-to-panel rhythm. Such daily strips were the direct seedbed of the comic book format, establishing the visual grammar — speech balloons, sequential panels, recurring cast — that anthology reprint collections would package as the first comic books by the late 1930s.