Polly and Her Pals — 1922-03-22

Four daily panels in Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 and among the most graphically inventive strips in American newspaper syndication. Here, Pa Perkins produces an extended, room-filling hiss — rendered as cascading SSSSSSS letterforms that physically crowd the panel space — prompting his wife to demand he stop, while a neighbor Mr. Hitt apparently pitches a fit at the sound every time. The punchline: Hitt is an actor, so the noise hits a professional nerve. Sterrett's bold linework, expressive figure distortion, and integration of sound into composition prefigure techniques later codified in comic books. These syndicated daily strips, collected and reformatted through the 1930s, were the direct material ancestors of the comic book as a print format.