Polly and Her Pals — The Washington Times, January 11, 1920

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* occupies the middle tier of this dense Sunday page, its subtitle — "Pa Isn't Any Crazier Than the Women Folks, at That" — announcing the strip's reliable engine: fashion-obsessed women versus a hapless, put-upon Pa. Six panels show Polly proposing to wear an extravagant feathered outfit in freezing weather, provoking family outcry, while Pa quietly retreats to his armchair. Sterrett's line is confident and economical, his figures round and expressive — a style that would grow into bold Art Deco abstraction by the late 1920s. The strip, syndicated from 1912, is significant precisely because it predates the comic book: these syndicated Sunday pages — shared across dozens of papers, featuring recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons — invented the visual grammar that comic books later inherited wholesale.