Polly and Her Pals — 1922-01-09

Four panels of sharp domestic comedy: 'Pa' tries to give up his seat to a large, elaborately hatted woman on public transit; she insists he stay seated; he insists he stand; the escalating courtesies collapse into exasperated slapstick, Pa finally shouting *'Confound yer impudence! I wanna git out!'* Sterrett's line work is dense and kinetic — hatching, exaggerated silhouettes, figures pressed into shallow space — typical of his sophisticated draftsmanship. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 by the New York Evening Telegram and syndicated nationally, was among the newspaper comic strips whose recurring characters, sequential panels, and speech balloons directly supplied the formal vocabulary that comic books would codify in the late 1930s.