Polly and Her Pals — 1920-09-04

Four panels follow Paw, the strip's hapless patriarch, as he admires his six-month mustache growth in a mirror, then crouches seaside with a magnifying glass desperately trying to spot Polly's hair color before it turns grey. Polly herself—fashionably dressed in a striped swimsuit—anchors the gag with imperious calm while Paw scrambles in the surf. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, and by 1920 had established its signature dynamic: Polly as glamorous straight-woman, her father as comic foil. Sterrett's clean ink line, economical panel transitions, and speech-balloon timing helped codify the visual language that syndicated newspaper strips—the direct ancestors of the comic book—were assembling in real time.