Polly and Her Pals — 1922-08-23

In this four-panel daily, Pa promises Susie he'll be polite to her beau Pete — then boots him clean out the window. Confronted by Susie ('Y'needn't a'kicked him out! Why didn'tcha ask him to leave?'), Pa defends himself with deadpan logic: *'T'ain't polite t'ask people to go home. Hang it!'* Cliff Sterrett's linework is elastic and expressive, the figures rubbery with kinetic energy. Launched in 1912 by Hearst's King Features, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the earliest strips to experiment with geometric abstraction in backgrounds and bold graphic patterning — influences absorbed from Cubism. Such syndicated daily strips, running coast-to-coast, established the recurring cast, the sequential panel, and the speech balloon as the foundational grammar that comic books would codify a generation later.