Polly and Her Pals — "He Has No Pull with Pa"

Cliff Sterrett's four-panel daily strip follows a suitor's hapless attempt to win over Polly's father. The young man offers cigars — Pa holds a sign reading DON'T SMOKE. He tries a gallon of home brew — DON'T DRINK. The strip closes with Pa's gleeful revenge: the suitor, apparently a dentist, gets a tooth pulled. Sterrett's draftsmanship is fluid and expressive, with rubber-limbed figures and clean, confident linework typical of early newspaper syndication. Launched in 1912 by the New York Evening Telegram, *Polly and Her Pals* pioneered the recurring-cast domestic comedy strip and later became celebrated for its Cubist-influenced Sunday pages. These syndicated dailies — drawn, printed, and distributed at industrial scale — formed the direct commercial and visual foundation from which the comic book format would emerge two decades later.