Polly and Her Pals — 1922-06-05

Four panels show a robbery interrupted — not by heroics but by Aunt Maggie, who objects less to losing her watch than to being denied a kiss from the bandit. The final panel flips the power entirely: she has the robber in a headlock while scolding him for ruining her moment. Sterrett's draftsmanship is elastic and energetic, figures torquing in exaggerated poses, speech balloons packed with phonetic dialect. Launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram*, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first strips to use abstracted, almost Cubist backgrounds by the 1920s. Sterrett's daily and Sunday pages — like those of Outcault, McCay, and McManus — established the sequential visual grammar that newspaper syndicates would soon repackage as the first comic books.