Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip

Four slim panels follow Pa and a neighbor trading gossip: Polly has given her suitor Fred "the gate." When Pa's wife relays the news, Pa asks why — and learns Fred's handwriting was so atrocious that Polly was ashamed to show his love letters to her friends. Sterrett draws his figures with loose, expressive linework; the armchairs and lamp anchor a recognizable domestic interior. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, was among the first strips to build its comedy around a recurring cast of family eccentrics rather than a single protagonist. Strips like this one — syndicated daily and on Sundays — established the panel-by-panel sequential grammar and speech-balloon conventions that printers would later repackage wholesale into the first comic books of the 1930s.