Polly and Her Pals — August 10, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip, titled "Ashur Has No Defense," runs four panels on a beach. A lanky striped-suit figure relays that lifeguard Larry said someone looks "jess ezzactly" like him; the punchline lands when the lookalike turns out to be twice his size — punctuated by a comedic splash and the word *BLUP*. Sterrett's linework is loose and kinetic, his lettering phonetic and expressive. Launched in 1912, *Polly* was among the earliest newspaper strips to develop a stable cast of recurring characters across daily and Sunday formats — the very infrastructure that would soon be reprinted as pamphlets and sold as comic books, making Sterrett and his peers the inadvertent architects of a new medium.