Polly and Her Pals — 1925-06-18

Four horizontal panels follow a single comic beat: Polly reports to a seated older man that Jack Beanstock is 'the most amateurish kisser I ever saw,' prompting an older woman to lament the younger generation's lack of modesty, then Pa asks Polly to confirm the gossip, and Polly closes with the punchline — 'Considering all of the lessons I've given him!' Cliff Sterrett launched *Polly and Her Pals* in 1912 for the New York Evening Telegram, and it ran for decades as a daily and Sunday page. Sterrett's draftsmanship grew increasingly abstract over the years — bold geometric blacks, tilting architecture, cubist-inflected backgrounds — making the strip one of the most visually inventive of the newspaper page era, the direct seedbed from which the comic book would grow.