Polly and Her Pals — 1922-12-19

In this daily strip, Pa sits rocking at home as a son-in-law scolds him for hocking the family's possessions to cover a broker's margin call. Ma then wanders into a pawnshop — "Hender's" — and recognizes so much of the household furniture on display that she declares it feels more like home than home itself. Sterrett's chunky, slightly cubist figures and loose crosshatching are already distinctive; his work on *Polly and Her Pals* (launched 1912) prefigures the Art Deco formal experiments that would mark his Sunday pages by the late 1920s. Comic strips like this one — syndicated daily, read by millions — were the direct seed of the comic book format: recurring characters, sequential panels, speech balloons, and comedic beats carried across installments.