Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-24

In this four-panel daily, Aunt Maggie's cough is the running gag: two characters debate whether cheerfulness might speed her recovery, then Maggie erupts in a volley of *Chow! Chow! Chow!* sneezes, yet seems easier than yesterday — because, she snaps in the final panel, she's been practicing all night. Sterrett's draftsmanship is loose and rubbery, figures built from fluid curves and heavy black stripes, speech balloons packed with vernacular phonetic spelling. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram* and became one of the longest-running strips in American newspaper history. Sterrett later pushed the Sunday pages toward near-cubist abstraction, making him one of the few early cartoonists whose formal experiments genuinely influenced fine-art contemporaries. The recurring ensemble cast and weekly comedic rhythm these dailies perfected were the direct structural template that shaped the comic-book anthology format when publishers began reprinting newspaper strips as pamphlets in the early 1930s.