Polly and Her Pals

Four horizontal panels follow Polly recounting a marriage proposal to a companion on the beach. The joke turns on whether her suitor knelt — he didn't, Polly notes, because only movie actors kneel; her father, overhearing from a hammock, wakes to grumble that he'd have settled things if he'd known. Cliff Sterrett drew *Polly and Her Pals* for the Newspaper Feature Service from 1912 onward, making it one of the longest-running American strips. Sterrett's fluid brushwork, expressive figures, and confident panel-to-panel comic timing exemplify exactly the visual grammar — discrete framed scenes, integrated speech balloons, recurring cast — that the newspaper daily syndicate invented and that comic books would later inherit wholesale.