Polly and Her Pals — 1922-12-12

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran for four decades, making it one of the longest-lived strips of the golden newspaper era. This daily strip, titled "Pa Get A Few Notes Out of the Piano," follows the hapless Pa Perkins through four panels: confronted about raising a thousand dollars for a margin call, his stock broker delivers the bad news, a scene of domestic distress follows, and the final panel finds Pa comically ejected from the household. Sterrett's loose, confident linework and expressive rubber-limbed figures were widely admired; his later Sunday pages pushed into near-Cubist abstraction. Newspaper dailies like this one were the direct ancestor of the comic book format, establishing the panel sequence, speech balloon, and recurring cast as storytelling fundamentals.