Polly and Her Pals — September 12, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip, syndicated by Newspaper Feature Service. In four compact panels, the fashionable Polly confronts her bumbling father Paw over a supposed insult to her beau Ashur: Paw owes an apology, Ashur claims Paw accused him of stealing a lost five-dollar bill, Paw denies it — then admits he only said Ashur *might* have found it had he helped look. The gag turns on Paw's semantic wriggle. Sterrett's cross-hatched rendering, expressive postures, and tightly sequenced speech balloons exemplify the daily newspaper strip's mature visual grammar by 1922 — a grammar invented panel by panel in the decade since *Mutt and Jeff* and *Bringing Up Father* established recurring-character comedy as America's defining popular art form.