Polly and Her Pals — 1917

Five panels follow Polly as she hustles from home to a skating rink instead of business college, lunch box in hand. Her blustering father notices the box's suspicious weight; Polly demands it back from a younger sibling, then sprints off; a figure at the rink frets she isn't coming; the final panel reveals the box bottom gave way, scattering skates across the street. Sterrett's draftsmanship is precise and lively — crosshatched coats, expressive silhouettes, balloon text that pitches and crowds with the characters' urgency. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* became one of the longest-running American strips, and Sterrett later pushed its Sunday pages toward near-abstract Art Deco geometry, influencing generations of cartoonists working in the visual grammar these newspaper dailies invented.