Polly and Her Pals — January 14, 1922

Four panels, two characters: a lanky man and a fashionably dressed young woman (Polly) exchange gossip about a Miss Peach panning the man's dancing — "too much sameness about it." His solution, delivered in the final panel, is to stomp on her *left* foot for variety. Sterrett's draftsmanship is fluid and angular, his figures exaggerated but precisely controlled, dialogue carried entirely in speech balloons. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 in the Hearst syndicate, one of the strips that codified the daily comic's visual grammar — sequential panels, recurring cast, comic escalation to a punch-line payoff — the direct structural ancestor of the comic book page itself.