Polly and Her Pals — 1922-04-19

Four panels follow a blustering man demanding proper food at a restaurant. A waiter lifts a cloche lid to reveal a comically small portion; the diner bends close in disbelief; in the final panel crockery flies as he erupts in frustration. Sterrett's linework is confident and elastic — rubbery figures, bold blacks, and expressive silhouettes drawn with the economy of a cartoonist who had been refining his hand since 1912. *Polly and Her Pals* launched that year in the *New York Evening Telegram* and ran for nearly four decades, long enough for Sterrett to push its Sunday pages into near-abstract Cubist design. These syndicated daily strips — panels, speech balloons, recurring cast — were the direct material from which the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s were assembled and reprinted.