Polly and Her Pals — 1922-01-30

Four panels of rapid-fire domestic comedy: a stout, polka-dotted "Ma" tries to dictate a note to Pa's stenographer, who types so furiously — rendered in cascading onomatopoeia, *click clack ding clickity clack* — that Ma can't keep pace with her own rambling thoughts. Sterrett's figures are boldly inked, almost cartoonishly round, and the sound-effect lettering itself becomes visual texture across the panels. Clifford Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by 1922 it was among the most formally inventive strips in syndication — his later Sunday pages pushed into near-abstraction. These daily strips, distributed via Newspaper Feature Service, are foundational documents: the panel-by-panel grammar, speech balloons carrying dialect, recurring ensemble characters — all refined here, years before comic books existed as a format.