Polly and Her Pals — August 11, 1922

Four panels of wordplay unfold at the beach: two characters wrestle in the surf while a third watches, the joke hinging on calling Ma an 'angel' — she's 'allus up in the air' and 'forever harping on somethin'.' Sterrett renders the figures in loose, rubbery pen-work, the waves sketched with economical crosshatching. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, was among the first strips to build a comedy around a recurring domestic ensemble rather than a single protagonist. Sterrett's increasingly abstract, Cubist-influenced Sunday pages of the 1920s pushed newspaper comic art toward genuine formal experiment — these daily strips show the tighter, gag-driven side of a career that helped establish the visual conventions all subsequent comic art inherited.