Polly and Her Pals — August 17, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* ran from 1912 to 1958, making it one of the longest-lived strips in American newspaper history. This four-panel daily plays out a classic beach-scene gag: a man wakes Polly to get her attention, asks whether she'd rouse her sleeping father if he tried to steal a kiss, receives a firm "Certainly not!"—then in the final panel Pa erupts from the sand, having heard everything. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already showing the bold geometric abstraction that would mark his Sunday pages: chunky figures, crosshatched dunes, expressive silhouettes. Newspaper dailies like this one are the direct ancestors of the comic book, establishing sequential panel grammar, speech balloons, and recurring cast dynamics that anthology reprint collections—*Famous Funnies* (1934) foremost among them—would soon package and sell as a new medium.