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From the exhibition

Polly and Her Pals — September 9, 1922

· Cliff Sterrett, 1922

Polly and Her Pals — September 9, 1922
Four panels, titled *Now You Know the Size of Pa's Gloves*, follow a young woman who decides to buy her father a pair of gloves as a gift. At a shop counter she admits she hasn't the faintest idea of his size — then volunteers, with perfect comic logic, that he wears a fifteen collar. Sterrett's linework is clean and expressive, his figures dressed in sharp 1920s fashion, his gags built on deadpan misunderstanding. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 by the New York Evening Telegram, was among the first newspaper strips to develop a stable cast across years of daily and Sunday pages — exactly the recurring-character, sequential-panel format that King Features syndicates would soon bundle into the earliest comic books.

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