Polly and Her Pals — November 7, 1922

Four panels track a domestic standoff: Paw wants guests to dance on the newly waxed parlor floor; Susie refuses to be the one to tell them; Paw is reminded he's supposed to be man of the house; and the strip closes with his solution — spikes in his shoes. Sterrett's thick, rubbery linework, compressed figures, and stacked speech balloons are characteristic of his mature daily style. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, was among the first strips to build comedy around a recurring family ensemble rather than a single protagonist. Strips like this one — syndicated, sequentially paneled, character-driven — were the direct formal ancestors of the comic book page.