Polly and Her Pals — 1922-03-06

Four panels titled *If Somebody'll Explain the Explanation It'll Be Perfectly Clear*. Two older characters argue in armchairs — one insisting they didn't know what they knew when they said what they said — while a younger woman, Lottie, enters and receives a tangled non-apology that reverses itself completely by the final panel, leaving her bewildered amid an explosion of decorative flourishes. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already distinctive: sinuous Art Nouveau linework, patterned upholstery, and characters whose rubbery faces compress emotion into pure graphic shorthand. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for Hearst's *New York Evening Telegram*. Its Sunday pages — dense, geometrically adventurous compositions — influenced a generation of cartoonists and demonstrate how the syndicated newspaper strip established recurring cast, sequential panel grammar, and the speech balloon as standard storytelling tools long before the comic book format existed.