Polly and Her Pals — Daily Strip, 1922

Four panels follow Polly and her stout, elaborately dressed mother as Pa, apparently dodging creditors over bankruptcy, watches his wife shoplift furs from a Fine Furs window display. The gag builds panel by panel: suspicion, opportunity, execution, and a deadpan final punchline — 'So why should anyone suspect?' Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, and by 1922 his draftsmanship was pushing newspaper comic art toward near-Cubist figure distortion — bold silhouettes, inventive staging, fluid speech balloons anchored precisely to character. These dailies, syndicated nationally, are the direct ancestors of the comic book: the recurring cast, the sequential panel grammar, and the gag-strip rhythm that anthology reprint publishers would soon bind and sell as something new.