Polly and Her Pals — "Pa, Evidently, Has Won a Diploma in Diplomacy"

Four daily-strip panels by Clifford Sterrett follow Pa through a domestic misfire: he opens by apologizing abjectly to Maw, who snaps "Don't speak to me!"; a boy then tells Pa he's "no diplomat," which Pa ruefully concedes; the boy asks what a diplomat actually is; Pa delivers the punchline — "a feller which allus remembers a woman's birthday an' fergits her age." Sterrett's loose, energetic linework and phonetic dialect are signatures of his long-running strip, launched in 1912 and among the most graphically inventive of the era. These compact daily strips — syndicated nationally by Newspaper Feature Service — fed directly into the reprint anthologies of the 1930s that became the first comic books, carrying with them the panel-by-panel grammar Sterrett helped standardize.