Polly and Her Pals — 1922-11-10

This four-panel daily strip, titled *Aunt Maggie Warbles 100 Per Cent, Oh My, Yes*, features the rotund, imperious Aunt Maggie attempting to sing along with the piano tuner's work — and promptly driving him off-key. Cliff Sterrett's draftsmanship is already confident: exaggerated silhouettes, expressive hands, and tightly choreographed panel-to-panel action carry the gag cleanly without wasted space. Speech balloons deploy phonetic dialect to comic effect. Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate; by the 1920s its domestic ensemble — Polly, her father Paw, and the volcanic Maggie — were household names. These syndicated newspaper dailies and Sunday pages, reprinted and stapled, became the direct physical ancestor of the comic book format.