Polly and Her Pals — 1917-03-20

Four horizontal panels follow a domestic comedy hinging on a 'dance and grow thin' scheme. Aunt Maggie and Pa Perkins watch a stout woman emerge unchanged from a week of effort; a dapper interloper insists the theory is proven 'maintained from the first'; the household erupts, chasing him off with cries of 'Poo! Poo!' Sterrett's line is already confident — angular figures, bold blacks, expressive silhouettes. *Polly and Her Pals* debuted in 1912 and ran until 1958, making it among the longest-lived American strips. Sterrett would later push the form toward near-abstract Cubist backgrounds; even this early daily shows the tight panel-to-panel cause-and-effect rhythm that newspaper comic artists were codifying as the visual grammar later inherited by comic books.