Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (1912–1958) follows the domestic misadventures of the Perkins household. In this daily strip, Pa fields a request for carfare from a visitor, then sits reading a newspaper while muttering about a rich young man courting Polly — someone with "more money than brains." The final panel lands the punchline: a phone call from what sounds like an asylum offering to send their "funny-wagon." Sterrett draws in a crisp, angular style that would grow increasingly abstract through the decade. The strip represents a mature phase of the newspaper daily form — the compressed four-panel joke sequence with speech balloons, recurring cast, and deadpan domestic irony — the very structural vocabulary that would migrate directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.