Polly and Her Pals — 1922-09-02

In this four-panel daily strip, Pa devises a scheme to fire the cook from a safe remove: he sneaks out to the corner drugstore and phones home, instructing the family to tell her she's "wanted on the wire." Sterrett's figures are boldly caricatured — wide bodies, expressive hands, overlapping speech balloons — demonstrating the visual shorthand that newspaper comic artists were codifying in real time. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 for the Hearst syndicate, would grow increasingly avant-garde through the 1920s, its Sunday pages rivaling Cubist design. Newspaper strips like this one supplied the recurring characters, panel grids, and balloon conventions that comic books would wholesale adopt when they began reprinting dailies as pamphlets in the early 1930s.