Polly and Her Pals — 1922-03-04

Titled *Maybe He Was Wound Up Too Tight*, this four-panel daily strip opens with a cat watching someone sleep amid buzzing sound effects, then cuts to a woman's explosive laughter — "gusty gales of girlish glee" — at a newspaper; her amusement bewilders a companion named Freddie, who admits feeling "thoroughly wound up tight"; the strip closes with a terse dismissal. Sterrett's draftsmanship is assured: loose hatching, dynamic lettering, and expressive figure work suit the domestic comedy. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912, was among the first newspaper strips to foreground a young woman as lead character. Sterrett later pushed the strip toward angular Art Deco abstraction, making it a touchstone for studying how syndicated newspaper pages — the direct ancestors of the comic book — developed sophisticated visual language through recurring characters and weekly seriality.