Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-20

In this four-panel daily strip, Pa Perkins coaches himself to mutter "great guns" at the door so neighbors will mistake him for someone else—a ruse that backfires when his wife Neewah, startled awake, hollers "Hon. Cannon!" into the night. The final panel finds Pa and a friend sheepishly comparing notes on the party they've both sneaked away from. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, eventually pushing newspaper comic art toward near-Cubist abstraction in his Sunday pages. These dailies, more domestic and gag-driven, show the tight sequential logic—setup, complication, punchline—that newspaper strips were perfecting in the 1910s–20s, laying the structural groundwork that comic books would inherit wholesale a decade later.