Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-31

A four-panel daily strip in Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (Newspaper Feature Service, 1912–1958), one of the longest-running American newspaper strips. Here, Pa Perkins is confronted about a man in the parlor, then harangued over selling the family flivver — a Model T era jalopy — to someone he defensively insists he never called a 'speedy boat.' The punchline reveals Pa has been arrested eight times not for speeding but for blocking traffic. Sterrett's loose, rubbery linework and expressive bickering figures typify the daily strip format that syndicates distributed nationwide, training readers in the left-to-right panel grammar and balloon-driven dialogue that comic-book editors would codify into the bound page a decade later.