Polly and Her Pals — 1917-06-12

Six horizontal panels follow Pa, a rumpled homebody, as two gossiping women deliver an unstoppable torrent of fashion intelligence — black Chantilly lace, écru filet lace, silver lamé belts, crêpe meteor frocks — while Pa sits buried in an armchair, visibly overwhelmed. The gag accumulates through pure verbal escalation; the women grow more animated, Pa more glazed. Sterrett's linework is loose and expressive, faces built from exaggerated curves, costumes rendered with genuine textile specificity. Launched in the *New York Evening Telegram* in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* became a laboratory for the visual innovations — decorative Art Deco geometry, vertiginous perspective, bold pattern — that would mark Sterrett's mature work. Daily strips like this one were the direct precursor to the reprint anthology comic books of the 1930s that gave the medium its name.