Polly and Her Pals — 1920-09-27

Four panels track a marriage proposal: Polly tells suitor Ormund she'll think it over, while her rotund mother and a gossiping neighbor process the news with escalating alarm — the groom is 'Ole Goldbag's grandson,' a ne'er-do-well, yet crucially the old man's sole heir, and the clincher arrives in the final panel: the rich uncle 'jess took up aviation.' Sterrett's draftsmanship is loose and kinetic, figures rendered in thick, expressive line with exaggerated silhouettes. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* ran in Hearst syndication for decades, becoming a laboratory for abstract, Cubist-influenced Sunday-page design. These dailies — alongside Mutt and Jeff, Krazy Kat, and Little Nemo — established the interlocking conventions of sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, and recurring casts that newspaper strips handed directly to the first comic books of the 1930s.