Polly and Her Pals — 1922-03-10

Four panels, no Sunday color: a man on a wall telephone tips off 'the pests' that the household women are running over; two large-hatted, fur-coated matrons listen skeptically; then 'Pest says not to wear your new furs or his wife'll turn green'; the final panel has a boy tugging at his mother's sleeve — 'C'mon ma, let's go!' Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, and its domestic ensemble — bumbling father Paw, fashion-obsessed women, wisecracking kids — ran until 1958. Sterrett's daily strips share a direct lineage with Outcault's *Yellow Kid* and Dirks's *Katzenjammer Kids*: recurring casts, sequential panels, integrated speech balloons — the structural vocabulary that 1930s anthology publishers simply stapled together and called comic books.