Polly and Her Pals — 1922-07-04

A Fourth of July daily strip by Cliff Sterrett finds the Perkins family outdoors after dark setting off fireworks. Paw Perkins commandeers the operation with characteristic bluster — "if anybody thinks they kin do this better'n me, let 'em step up an' shut up" — while Maw scolds him about his white pants, a child crouches nervously, and Uncle Sam lights pinwheels. Sterrett's loose, energetic line and stacked speech balloons capture domestic comedy in real time. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, was among the earliest strips to develop a fully recurring cast with consistent personalities across years — exactly the serialized character logic that would migrate from newspaper pages into the first comic books of the 1930s.