Polly and Her Pals — November 17, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* ran from 1912 to 1958, making it one of the longest-lived American newspaper strips. This four-panel daily, titled "It Was Neewah's Loss, Too," follows the family's discovery that thieves have stolen all the household silver — wedding spoons, coffee service, everything. The comic pivot lands in the final panel: Pa's real grief is that he spent the whole previous day polishing it. Sterrett draws with an angular, nearly Cubist economy rare in 1922 dailies. Speech balloons carry phonetic dialect, and the tight panel progression — shock, lament, consolation, punchline — demonstrates the compressed storytelling grammar newspaper artists were then codifying, conventions that would directly shape the first comic books assembled from reprinted strips in the early 1930s.