Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-10

Four panels: Polly returns a ring to the hulking Rollo, announcing she loves another. Rollo fumes, hunts down the rival, grabs him — then, battered himself, pivots instantly to salesmanship, offering Polly's cast-off ring to the little fellow he just tried to thrash. Sterrett's linework is assured — thick contour figures, expressive faces, speech balloons integrated cleanly into the action. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 by Hearst's King Features, ran for decades and grew increasingly bold in its Art Deco graphic design. Sterrett belongs to the founding generation — Outcault, McCay, McManus — whose syndicated newspaper strips invented sequential visual storytelling: the repeating cast, the panel grid, the balloon as dramatic instrument. Those broadsheet pages are where the comic book was born.