Polly and Her Pals — 1922-04-06

Four panels track a domestic quarrel through its comic resolution: a husband and wife argue in armchairs about who said what; she decides the ladylike course is to apologize; she approaches a bonneted visitor with a conciliatory opening line; the final panel erupts in verbal chaos as she retracts the retraction of the refusal to take back her original remark. Sterrett's line is crisp and Art Nouveau-inflected, his speech balloons densely packed with italics and capitalization that perform vocal stress on the page. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, is one of the earliest strips to build comedy from recurring domestic character dynamics rather than single-gag sight humor — a structural shift that made the serialized newspaper strip the direct ancestor of the comic book format.