Polly and Her Pals — "Pa's Perfectly Willing"

Cliff Sterrett's daily strip follows the Perkins household with loose-limbed wit. In this four-panel gag, Pa volunteers to mind a music shop while the owner gets a haircut — then finds himself ambushed by a flirtatious customer who asks whether he knows *"Kissed Me in the Moonlight."* His flustered reply — *"not as I recollect, miss"* — ends on a game shrug. Sterrett's draftsmanship is confident: angular figures, busy crosshatching, sheet-music titles lettered on display cards for period texture. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* pioneered the recurring-cast domestic strip and Sterrett later pushed its Sunday pages into near-abstract design, influencing generations of cartoonists working in the daily-newspaper form that directly seeded the comic-book format.