Polly and Her Pals — October 2, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* began in 1912 and ran for decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips of the newspaper comics era. This four-panel daily follows Pa and Polly discussing Ma's abandoned driving lessons. Ma explains she quit because motoring is "no pastime fer a lady of culture an' refinement" — then, in the punchline panel, confesses the real reason: every bump in the road makes her curse "somethin' horrible." Sterrett drew with confident ink economy: expressive silhouettes, checked trousers, exaggerated gesture. These syndicated dailies and Sunday pages — circulated nationally through services like Newspaper Feature Service — literally invented comics' visual grammar: recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons, timed comic rhythm. Sterrett later pushed toward near-Cubist abstraction in his Sunday pages, making him one of the form's genuine visual experimenters.