Polly and Her Pals — 1922-07-26

Four panels, captioned *A Perfectly Fair Question but Fraught with Meaning*. A young man on a porch steps asks a seated flapper what time it is; chaos erupts as her beau misreads the exchange and a mother intervenes, scolding them for making a scene and sending Harry home. The final panel's twist: the young man only wanted to set his watch — it had stopped. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by 1922 it was among the most graphically adventurous strips in syndication, its Sunday pages pushing toward near-abstract pattern and design. These daily strips established the tight four-panel rhythm — setup, complication, reversal, punchline — that newspaper comic pages handed directly to the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s.