Polly and Her Pals — 1922-07-31

Four panels track a couple's moviegoing disaster. Promised a night out, they arrive to find the marquee announcing *The Taming of the Shrew* — not the animal-training picture they dreaded, but Shakespeare. The joke lands in the final panel: both characters, slumped and disheveled, declare they abominate animal pictures, having apparently misread the title entirely. Sterrett's line work is loose and kinetic, his figures rubbery with expressive hats and coats doing as much acting as the faces. Polly and Her Pals, launched in 1912, was among the earliest newspaper strips to develop a stable cast across years of daily gags — exactly the recurring-character model that anthology reprint collections would systematize into the comic book format by the 1930s. Sterrett later pushed the strip toward near-abstract Art Deco backgrounds, making him one of newspaper comics' most formally adventurous practitioners.