Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-23

Four-panel daily strip by Cliff Sterrett, one of the defining draughtsmen of the American newspaper comic page. The gag follows Ashur, the portly, mustachioed patriarch, who carries a pillow to orchestra practice. Asked why, he explains it shields him from the slide-trombonist who holds a grudge — so as bandleader he simply seats himself directly in front of the man. Sterrett's figure work is confident and loose, his speech balloons packed with phonetic dialect spelling. *Polly and Her Pals* (1912–1958) pioneered the recurring domestic-comedy strip format; by the mid-1920s Sterrett would push its Sunday pages toward near-Cubist abstraction. Strips like this daily — syndicated nationally, reprinted across hundreds of papers — were the raw material that anthology publishers cut-and-reprinted to create the first comic books in the 1930s.