Polly and Her Pals — 1925-01-02

Four panels track the aftermath of a Christmas dance: Polly and her mother scheme to escape Paw's post-holiday grouchiness, then Paw sits alone amid a blizzard of bills — from the jeweler Grant Peacock among others — his relief at solitude curdling into dread. Sterrett's figures are India-ink grotesques with rubberized limbs and Art Nouveau silhouettes; his final panel, dense with overlapping invoice slips and a cramped accountant's desk lamp, anticipates the compositional compression of later comic-book splash pages. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first strips to foreground a recurring female protagonist while making the blustering patriarch the true comic engine — a structural trick newspaper syndication refined into the default grammar of the American family strip.