Polly and Her Pals — August 12, 1922

Four panels track a domestic comedy: a man nurses shooting pains with an ice bag while a cat prowls underfoot; Polly plays piano with comic-strip onomatopoeia — *Tinkle, Plinkity, Plank* — rattling the room; a neighbor arrives to complain about the noise; Polly's response is to play louder, the final panel erupting in *Bam! Boom! Plink! Plunkity!* Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, and by the 1920s his draftsmanship had grown wildly inventive — Cubist-influenced backgrounds, elastic figures, and sound effects integrated as visual mass. These syndicated daily and Sunday strips, printed in millions of newspapers, collectively invented the grammar — recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons, expressive lettering — that comic books would inherit wholesale within two decades.