Polly and Her Pals — 1917-05-22

Four panels track the valet Ashur attempting to brush his employer's spectacularly disreputable coat. The strip's comedy pivots on escalating indignity: a dusty garment declared unfit for a gentleman's valet to touch, a locked door demanded before the coat's horror is revealed, and the final panel's gag — the old man fainting at the sight while Ashur hurries to finish the job. Sterrett's linework is fluid and angular, anticipating the Art Deco stylization his strip would develop through the 1920s. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, belongs to the daily-strip tradition pioneered by Outcault and McManus — recurring characters, speech balloons, sequential panel logic — the exact conventions that newspaper syndicates packaged into the first comic books two decades later.