Polly and Her Pals — "Keeping It Dark"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran for decades as one of the most stylistically adventurous strips in American newspapers. This four-panel daily follows the family's discovery that Polly and her beau Jack have been kissing in the parlor — a smacking sound through the curtains gives them away — and closes on a silhouetted figure delivering the punchline about the engagement ring being given "in the dark." Sterrett uses heavy black silhouette in the final panel with confident economy, a technique he pushed further into near-Cubist abstraction in his Sunday pages. The strip exemplifies how newspaper dailies invented recurring domestic comedy, speech balloons carrying overlapping voices, and cinematic panel-to-panel staging — the raw vocabulary that comic books would inherit wholesale.