Polly and Her Pals — October 20, 1922

Four panels follow Ashur, Polly's father, as he shows off his new mustache to the household cat, who responds with a flat "Bah! Poo! Poo!" A neighbor then mocks it as a "bloomin' baseball mustache," and when Ashur bristles at the insult, gets a faceful of water for his trouble. Sterrett's linework crackles with elastic energy — rubber-limbed figures, expressive lettering, and comic timing built entirely through posture and reaction. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 by the New York Evening Telegram, became one of the most artistically adventurous strips of its era. Sterrett's later Sunday pages pushed toward near-abstract Cubist patterning, but this daily shows his confident command of sequential gag structure — the same grammar that newspaper strips handed wholesale to the first comic books of the 1930s.