Polly and Her Pals — 1917-03-16

Five horizontal panels follow a domestic comedy hinging on green spectacles. Two older figures discuss Polly's study habits in the first panel; a woman in a dark dress emerges from a doorway to model her new "green specs" in the second; successive panels carry the gag through escalating, good-natured reactions culminating in a cluttered, shadow-heavy final panel where someone works at a desk. Sterrett's linework is already confident — crisp silhouettes, expressive hands, energetic speech balloons. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, became one of the strip's most formally inventive titles; Sterrett would later push toward near-abstract Art Deco geometry. These syndicated newspaper dailies and Sunday pages, recycled into early pamphlet reprints, form the direct material ancestor of the comic book format.