Polly and Her Pals — "Delica's Skirt Was a Jolt to Pa"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (NEA/Newspaper Feature Service) runs four panels built around a single absurdist premise: a "barrel skirt," billed in a fashion-note caption as the latest Parisian import, turns out to be a literal barrel. A woman has fallen into one; a second struggles to extract her; a third wears the thing as a skirt and blithely explains she was standing on it to reach the pantry shelf when it caved in. The strip closes on Pa, glass of grape juice in hand, confessing the skirt gave him a jolt he hadn't anticipated. Sterrett's chunky cross-hatching, expressive balloon lettering, and tight gag architecture exemplify the daily newspaper strip's role as the direct ancestor of the comic book — recurring characters, sequential panels, and visual storytelling conventions refined one four-panel row at a time.