Polly and Her Pals

Four daily panels: two characters watch a neighbor shingling his garage roof, climb up to observe, and confess their real motive — hearing what a parson says when he hits his finger with a hammer. The payoff lands in the final panel as tools fly and the parson's response goes unprinted. Sterrett draws in a loose, energetic ink style; figures tumble convincingly and the roofline anchors the middle panels with clean architectural geometry. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate and ran until 1958, making it one of the longest-lived American strips. Sterrett's later Sunday pages pushed toward near-abstract Art Deco backgrounds, marking him as among the most formally adventurous cartoonists of the early newspaper era, when syndicated strips were defining sequential visual storytelling itself.