Polly and Her Pals — 1922-08-02

Four panels follow Pa as he encounters Percy, Polly's suitor, apparently showing off at the beach. Pa's Scottish-inflected speech balloons — *"He would be a braw feller, t' boot, dangone his hide!"* — establish him as the strip's comic engine: a blustering, affectionate patriarch undone by his daughter's romantic life. Sterrett's linework is already confident: angular figures, bold hatching, expressive silhouettes. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 in the Hearst syndicate, was among the earliest newspaper strips to give a recurring female character top billing while centering her father's reactions as the real joke. Sterrett would later push into proto-Cubist page design; these early dailies show the grammar being assembled — stable panels, consistent characters, spoken dialect as personality.