Polly and Her Pals — August 28, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the most formally inventive strips of the early newspaper era. This four-panel daily finds Pa — the strip's perpetually exasperated patriarch — at the beach, delighted to doze by the sea. His stout, parasol-wielding wife discovers him asleep and rouses him with a scolding: she hasn't paid two dollars in carfare to watch him sleep at the shore. Sterrett's loose, expressive linework and compressed panel rhythm show the daily strip at full confidence. Alongside *Krazy Kat* and *Bringing Up Father*, *Polly* helped establish the recurring-cast domestic comedy that gave newspaper comics — and eventually the comic book — its structural DNA.