Polly and Her Pals — 1917-04-03

Six panels track young Ashur's ambitions as a classic dancer. Two older women debate his potential — one confident she can teach him, the other skeptical — while offscreen instruction produces crashes rendered as bold BAM and BUMP sound effects. The final panels reveal Ashur airborne, launched spectacularly through a doorway, prompting the punchline: *"Why dawgone it, gal, the sky's the limit!"* Sterrett's linework is clean and elastic, his figures exaggerated just enough to animate the timing. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly and Her Pals* pioneered sophisticated page composition in American newspaper comics. Sterrett would later develop a boldly abstract Sunday-page style, influencing generations of cartoonists. Daily strips like this one, syndicated nationally, were the direct raw material from which the first comic books — reprint collections of newspaper pages — were assembled in the early 1930s.