Polly and Her Pals — July 28, 1922

Four panels track a domestic eruption: Polly announces her engagement, her father responds with blustering congratulations, then meets the suitor — a gangly, checked-suited young man — and recoils with a sputtered "Great Scott!" The final panel finds Pa fleeing into the night, the same exclamation posted on a sign outside. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, making it one of the longest-running family strips in American newspaper history. His draftsmanship here — elastic figures, expressive squiggles for shock, confident panel-to-panel staging — exemplifies the visual shorthand that newspaper daily and Sunday strips codified into what would become the shared grammar of the comic book form itself.