Polly and Her Pals — 1922-01-13

Four panels, titled *Delicia's a Bit too Muscular*, follow two women after a suitor departs. One admits he didn't kiss her goodnight; her companion's shock escalates through increasingly physical dismay — crying, wailing, a full collapse onto the sofa — until she groans, 'Idiot that I am, I struggled too hard!' Sterrett's linework is fluid and expressive, the figures rubbery with emotion. *Polly and Her Pals*, syndicated from 1912, was among the first newspaper strips to develop a stable cast across years of dailies and Sundays — exactly the serialized, character-driven format that taught readers the visual grammar panels, speech balloons, and sequential action that comic books would later inherit wholesale.