Polly and Her Pals — February 20, 1922

Clifford Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* daily strip opens with a character muttering "Kin it be possible?" before two gossiping women confirm that Polly has indeed "thrown that guy over." The punchline lands in the final panel: a man has literally been hurled through the air and crashes into furniture — because, as the caption notes, "you know how a girl throws." The visual joke plays the idiom dead straight. Sterrett's draftsmanship is notably sophisticated: crosshatched interiors, expressive silhouettes, and precisely timed panel rhythm. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly* ran for decades and influenced a generation of cartoonists. These syndicated newspaper strips — daily and Sunday — provided the direct template for the comic book page format, establishing recurring characters, sequential panels, and integrated speech balloons as the medium's core visual language.