Polly and Her Pals — September 22, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (1912–1958) is among the longest-running American newspaper strips, and this four-panel daily shows Sterrett near his classic form. Pa sits slumped while Ma and another character debate whether Willie is deaf or mentally afflicted; the punchline reveals he simply never listens — Pa calls it a gift. Sterrett's bulbous, flower-faced figures crowd the panels with kinetic energy, speech balloons stacked and overlapping in a way that feels genuinely modern. The strip belongs to the Hearst syndicate tradition that made the newspaper page the true cradle of sequential art: recurring cast, compressed storytelling, visual shorthand for emotion — the grammar that comic books would inherit wholesale from these daily and Sunday pages.