Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-13

Four panels follow a domestic standoff: Polly, mid-mirror, takes a telephone call while Pa slouches in an enormous armchair, his legs comically extended. A visitor asks whether the family has settled on a summer destination. Pa reports a difference of opinion — Ma wants Cape Cod, Pa wants the poorhouse — and the punchline lands as his chair nearly swallows him whole. Cliff Sterrett's draftsmanship is immediately recognizable: bold black silhouettes, exaggerated furniture that dwarfs its occupants, and a loose, rubbery figure style. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, was among the first newspaper strips to build sustained comedy around a recurring cast of family eccentrics — a structural invention that daily and Sunday strips passed directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.