Polly and Her Pals — 1922-01-19

Did You Ever Hear a Tree Bark? Four panels follow two stout, elaborately dressed characters — a man and woman in heavy coats and hats — admiring a large tree. He calls it magnificent; she guesses it a thousand years old. They wonder aloud what the old elm might say if it could speak. The punchline: the tree interrupts to announce, drily, *"I'm an oak."* Sterrett's draftsmanship is expressive and economical, with dense crosshatching and rubbery figure work typical of early syndicated dailies. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first strips to experiment with bold decorative composition. These newspaper dailies and Sunday pages — mass-printed, nationally distributed, built on recurring casts and sequential panels — directly seeded the comic book format that would consolidate in the 1930s.