Polly and Her Pals — August 30, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* ran as a Hearst syndicate daily from 1912, making it one of America's longest-lived comic strips. This four-panel gag follows Ashur ("Ash"), Polly's lovesick suitor, who boasts to Polly herself that she adores him — she disagrees — then gets dunked repeatedly in the surf each time he tries to kiss her, the waves doing the rejecting for her. Sterrett draws the ocean with loose, energetic linework; characters tumble and splash with rubbery physicality. The strip's title panel and speech balloons are period-standard, yet Sterrett would later push toward bold Art Deco abstraction that influenced a generation of cartoonists. Newspaper daily strips like this one are the direct ancestors of the comic book format — recurring characters, sequential panels, vernacular dialogue — packaged and reprinted in the first anthology comic books of the early 1930s.