Polly and Her Pals — "Pa Judged Only by Appearances"

Cliff Sterrett's four-panel daily follows the rotund, ruffled Pa as he overhears that the greengrocer uses the back door, demands to know why, discovers a vegetable basket left on the hall table in plain view, and then—mistaking it for his new hat—sends it flying with an indignant "Y'pore prune!" Sterrett's draftsmanship is distinctive: dense crosshatching, exaggerated figure masses, and energetic speech balloons packed with vernacular spelling. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the first strips to develop a stable ensemble cast around a single household. Newspaper comic strips of this era—syndicated daily and Sunday pages—were the direct seedbed of the comic book format, establishing panel sequencing, recurring characters, and the speech balloon conventions that would define the medium for the next century.