Polly and Her Pals — 1922-08-03

Four panels follow a beach scene domestic comedy: a woman asks whether Pa is coming, learns he is ill, then hears he fainted when told the hotel costs $500 a week — a doctor put him to bed with a headache. The final panel reveals Pa collapsed face-down in the surf, his daughter deadpanning that she warned him not to keep account of their expenses. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the early 1920s its bold pattern-work, expressive figure drawing, and tight panel-to-panel comic timing placed it among the most visually inventive newspaper daily strips of the era — strips whose recurring characters, speech balloons, and sequential panels directly established the grammar that comic books would inherit a decade later.