Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-11

Four panels follow Pa — stout, flustered, head buried under a car hood — while Polly leans from the seat demanding he consult the manual about the ignition. A dapper stranger stops to offer help; Pa, refusing to be upstaged, orders him to answer Polly's questions while *he* diagnoses the engine. Sterrett's line is loose and inventive: the automobile itself seems to vibrate with comic energy, its license plate (41144) a recurring anchor across panels. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first strips to experiment with abstracted, almost Cubist backgrounds — formal risk-taking rare in newspaper comics. These syndicated daily and Sunday strips, reproduced and bound into early anthology pamphlets, form the direct lineage from which the comic book, as a distinct format, grew.