Polly and Her Pals — "Pa's Got to Learn Another Language"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* debuted in 1912 and ran for decades as one of the most visually inventive strips in American newspapers. This daily strip follows Pa through four panels of golf-course griping: he blames a mashie shot for missing a putt, gets lectured on proper stroke technique by fellow players, then announces he simply must take up golf — not to play well, but to understand what everyone is arguing about. Sterrett's loose, expressive linework and phonetic dialogue give each panel kinetic energy. The strip exemplifies how newspaper dailies pioneered sequential visual storytelling — recurring characters, consistent panel grids, speech balloons carrying comedy — the very grammar that comic books would later inherit wholesale.