Polly and Her Pals — 1922-10-04

Four panels, black ink, titled *It Was Almost a Fatal Mistake on Pa's Part*. Pa, round and rumpled, bids farewell to a neighbor woman at the door; slipping on the step, he crashes down in a spectacular BUMP. Maw interrogates him: did he think Mrs. Gadd was the youngest-looking woman in their set? Pa, still crumpled on the floor, admits he said yes. Final panel: Maw stands arms-folded, furious, as Pa cowers. Sterrett's linework is loose and kinetic — tumbling figures rendered with rubbery energy. Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912, and by the early 1920s was pioneering bold graphic distortion that would later echo in modernist illustration. These syndicated dailies, alongside the Sunday pages of Herriman and McManus, established the visual conventions — recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons — that newspaper comics handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.