Polly and Her Pals — 1922-03-14

Four panels follow Ashur, the household's self-styled heart-smasher, through a rapid comic reversal. Opening on a lounging Polly, he announces he is done with women entirely — "dames, dadgone 'em!" — only for a friend to ask whether that includes "adorable Dora." Ashur confesses he discovered something about her the previous night he didn't like. The punchline lands in the final panel: what he disliked was Arthur's arm around her. Sterrett's draftsmanship is angular and syncopated, the figures tilted with an Art Deco restlessness unusual for 1922 newspaper strips. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 by the New York Evening Journal, is among the earliest strips built around a recurring female lead. Its daily and Sunday pages — sold through Hearst syndication — represent exactly the industrial reprinting pipeline that would, by the 1930s, produce the first comic books.