Polly and Her Pals — 1920-09-28

Four panels follow Ma's new hat through the household. Polly admires it; Ma worries whether it's too girlish for her age; Polly reassures her it makes her look ten years younger. Pa's horrified reaction lands the punchline: the hat makes *him* look ten years older. Sterrett's strip, launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, was among the first newspaper comics to develop a consistent cast with distinct visual personalities across months and years. That continuity — recurring faces, domestic setting, running family dynamics — is precisely the structural logic that would migrate into comic books two decades later. Sterrett's clean line and confident panel-to-panel staging exemplify the visual grammar newspaper artists were quietly standardizing for all sequential art that followed.