Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-20

Four panels trace a domestic comedy: someone has ruined the porch chairs with a moulting paintbrush, its bristles shedding across everything. Two women and a man trade recriminations on a bench, ending with the culprit hunched over a bucket of loose bristles while the damage surrounds him. Sterrett's draftsmanship is already distinctive—boldly patterned fabrics, angular figures, expressive posture carrying the joke as much as the dialogue balloons do. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the longest-running American comic strips, its daily and Sunday pages exemplifying the maturing visual grammar—sequential panels, integrated speech balloons, a fixed cast—that newspaper syndicates exported worldwide and that anthology reprint booklets would soon formalize into the comic book format itself.