Polly and Her Pals — "And That Settles It!"

Four panels follow a beach-side marriage proposal gone wrong. Two women gossip about a man's crush on a brunette; he pleads with the object of his affection; she rebuffs him flat; a wave then swamps the scene as she delivers the clincher — *"My husband would be furious!"* Cliff Starrett's draftsmanship is kinetic and assured, his figures rubbery and expressive, backgrounds spare but convincing. *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the longest-running American newspaper strips, its domestic comedy and visual inventiveness directly feeding the anthology reprint comics of the 1930s — the pamphlets that became the comic book. Starrett later pushed page design toward near-abstract decorative geometries that influenced a generation of cartoonists.