Polly and Her Pals — "The Fatal Word"

Clifford Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* (1912–1958) follows the fashionable Polly in four panels here: she tells a companion that when a suitor mentioned matrimony she "dismissed the subject with a word" — that word, revealed in the final panel as she swoons across the furniture, being "Yes." The timing is pure vaudeville, the punch landing on a single speech balloon. Sterrett's draftsmanship is notably sophisticated: elongated Art Nouveau figures, strong silhouettes, and confident ink work. The strip belongs to the Hearst syndicate era when daily and Sunday newspaper comics were inventing the visual language — recurring characters, sequential panels, integrated dialogue balloons — that would migrate wholesale into comic books by the late 1930s.