Polly and Her Pals — 1922-07-05

Four panels track a domestic argument between Ma and her checked-trousered husband Paw. Ma, having persuaded a skeptical Polly she can reform a man, crows that she has made Paw exactly what he is today — only for Paw, tumbled comically onto the floor amid scattered objects, to deflate her triumph: "Have I ever reproached you for it?" Sterrett's linework is confident and economical, the speech balloons tight and rhythmically paced. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 in the *New York Evening Telegram* and ran for decades, becoming one of the most formally inventive strips in American newspapers. Sterrett later pushed the Sunday pages toward near-abstract Cubist backgrounds — work that reminds us that the daily comic strip, not the gallery, is where American visual modernism first reached mass audiences.