Polly and Her Pals — 1925-02-17

Four panels follow Polly and her father Paw through a domestic hair-care exchange. Polly compliments a man named Harry on his thick hair; Harry credits careful grooming. A small, excitable figure then declares that a bald man is proof of criminal negligence — met with skepticism. Paw storms in bellowing "BAH!", and the final panel reveals why: his hair was exactly Polly's color, so he tore it out by the roots. Sterrett's draftsmanship is fluid and assured, mixing naturalistic figures with rubbery comic exaggeration. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 by the New York Evening Journal, became one of the most formally inventive newspaper strips of its era — Sterrett's later pages pushed toward near-abstract design, influencing how cartoonists understood the page itself as a visual field.