Polly and Her Pals — 1922-05-30

Four panels, a single gag: two passengers in a fast-moving automobile nearly strike a dog, each blaming the other for not steering — until the punchline reveals neither was driving. Sterrett renders the night-road scene in dense crosshatching, the car a looming dark mass, headlights cutting white circles into the black. Speech balloons arc naturally from unseen faces half-buried in fur coats and shadow. Polly and Her Pals launched in 1912 and became a laboratory for Art Deco abstraction in daily newspaper strips — the very format that, collected into pamphlets through the 1930s, gave rise to the comic book itself. Sterrett's bold geometry and flat black masses directly influenced later comics artists studying syndicated newspaper pages as their only available school.