Polly and Her Pals — 1922-03-08

Five panels follow Aunt Maggie and a male companion after she has slapped someone. He protests it was undignified; she counters she was too furious to control herself; he insists any lady would have found suitable words instead. The strip's punchline pivots when he asks what she would say if a young man put his arm around her — Maggie's stunned "Who? Me?" gives way to a final panel of pure silent satisfaction: arms folded, eyes shut, a blissful smile. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, making it one of the longest-running early newspaper strips. Its shifting cast of domestic grotesques and Sterrett's increasingly geometric, almost Cubist draftsmanship pushed the daily comic strip toward genuine visual invention, directly shaping the visual grammar that syndicated pages exported into the first comic books two decades later.