Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-16

Four panels, ink on paper. A flustered older gentleman arrives with flowers to call on Polly, who hasn't yet come downstairs. Her father Paw Perkins greets him — then keeps addressing him as 'Mike.' The caller corrects him: his name is Ned. Paw recovers by blaming the wrong night entirely, insisting he thought it was Wednesday. The gag lands on Paw's chronic forgetfulness, with Polly herself remaining offstage. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate; by the 1920s his draftsmanship was pushing toward bold geometric abstraction rare in newspaper strips. Daily and Sunday strips like this one — with their recurring cast, numbered panels, and speech balloons — directly supplied the page templates that early comic-book publishers would simply reprint and bind.