Polly and Her Pals — "Pa Gets Badly Stuck, as It Were"

Clifford Sterrett's daily strip unfolds in four compact panels: Pa examines a bottle, mistaking glue for hair oil; his wife identifies it in alarm; Pa, already having applied it, finds his hat cemented to his head; the family cat delivers the punchline by getting similarly stuck. Sterrett's draftsmanship is economical and assured — bold silhouettes, expressive body language, and speech balloons that carry the comic timing. *Polly and Her Pals* (launched 1912) was among the earliest newspaper strips to build comedy around a recurring domestic ensemble rather than a single protagonist. These syndicated daily strips, circulating millions of copies, established the sequential visual grammar — panels, gutters, integrated dialogue — that comic books would directly inherit when publishers began reprinting them as pamphlets in the 1930s.