Polly and Her Pals — 1925-01-22

Four panels tracking Pa Perkins and a male visitor who bond over their shared hatred of crossword puzzles — the craze then sweeping American households. Pa first bristles at the stranger, suspecting another puzzle enthusiast, then erupts in delight when the man declares he loathes them. The strip closes with Pa's wife announcing that nothing will come between her and her embroidery, a neat domestic punchline. Cliff Sterrett's draftsmanship here is clean and kinetic: exaggerated postures, expressive balloon lettering, and a strong black silhouette in panel two. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, became one of the most formally inventive strips of its era — Sterrett later pushed its Sunday pages toward near-abstract design — exemplifying how newspaper comic strips established the sequential art vocabulary that comic books would inherit wholesale.