Polly and Her Pals — 1922-09-19

Four panels, pen-and-ink daily: a man bets Polly he can kiss her without touching her, she calls the bluff, he kisses her squarely on the cheek (*SMACK!*), then cheerfully hands over his nickel. Sterrett's linework is loose and energetic — hatched shadows, expressive figures, speech balloons integrated naturally into the composition. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the long-running newspaper strips whose accumulated daily and Sunday pages were the direct antecedent of the comic book. Artists like Sterrett, McCay, and McManus codified the visual grammar — sequential panels, balloon dialogue, recurring cast — that reprint anthologies of the 1930s simply bound and sold as something new.