Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-30

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (1912–1958) runs here as a four-panel daily strip in which Polly, riding horseback with Pa, recounts a dream where Pa gave her a wristwatch and Ma a diamond drop. Pa laughs that dreams go by contraries — so in reality Ma gets the watch and he gets *the drop*, which the horse promptly delivers, launching him skyward in the final panel. Sterrett's draftsmanship is precise and kinetic: confident ink lines, expressive silhouetted horses, and economical speech balloons carry the gag cleanly across panels. Launched in the *New York Evening Telegram*, the strip helped establish the recurring-cast domestic comedy as a newspaper staple — the syndicated daily strip being the direct commercial and visual ancestor of the comic book format that would coalesce in the 1930s.