Polly and Her Pals — 1917-05-02

Four horizontal panels follow Neewah, the household servant, beating a rug while the family debates who is responsible for the absent Ashur's chores. Speech balloons trade rapid-fire blame — Polly dragged Ashur to the circus — before a pompous neighbor is shooed away with a rug-beater's satisfying *WOP*. Sterrett's line work is loose and kinetic; characters lean and gesticulate with rubbery energy against spare architectural backgrounds. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 in the Hearst syndicate, joining a generation of newspaper strips — Outcault's *Yellow Kid*, McCay's *Little Nemo*, McManus's *Bringing Up Father* — whose artists forged the sequential grammar of recurring characters, panel gutters, and integrated dialogue that directly seeded the comic book form.