Polly and Her Pals — 1922-11-06

Four panels, black and white. A kneeling suitor pleads with Polly, who directs him to speak with Pa first. Pa — squat, explosive, magnificently disheveled — refuses outright, hurling the young man out the door in the final panel while offering, with backhand logic, to take Polly off his hands himself. Sterrett's draftsmanship is elastic and precise: figures distort under emotional pressure, furniture shudders, speed lines blur the ejected Felix into abstraction. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram* and ran forty years. Sterrett pioneered Cubist-inflected backgrounds and expressive figure distortion, pushing newspaper comic strips — the direct ancestor of the comic book format — toward a visual sophistication rarely matched in the daily press.