Polly and Her Pals — 1922-09-21

Four panels of Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* track a domestic comedy built entirely on Ma's jealousy. The cook has told Ma that Pa was seen hugging a lamp-post at four in the morning; Ma confronts Pa in a fury while daughter Susie urges disbelief. Pa's defense — "How perfectly absurd!" — lands with rubbery comic timing, and the strip closes on Ma's indignant punchline: *"The idea of you being jealous of an old lamp-post!"* Sterrett's figures are loose and expressive, with cross-hatched skirts and elastic body language that anticipate his later Cubist experiments. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first daily strips to develop a stable recurring cast, helping establish the serial domestic-comedy format that would define newspaper comics — and eventually the comic book — for decades.