Polly and Her Pals — 1920-09-09

Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by 1920 it was among the most visually inventive strips in syndication. This beach-set daily runs four panels: two bystanders gossip about Polly's admirer Ashur, who then attempts to steal a kiss; Polly protests indignantly; Ashur claims he only puckered because he had sand in his mouth; and Polly, unimpressed, spits a stream of water on him with the advice to "swaller it—you need some in your system." Sterrett's draftsmanship is crisp and economical, his speech balloons precisely shaped to character. The strip's caption—*Sand, sand everywhere, but not a grain has Ashur*—shows the punning wit that made newspaper comic pages America's first true sequential-art laboratory, incubating the panel grammar and recurring-cast storytelling that comic books would later inherit wholesale.