Polly and Her Pals — 1922-09-13

Good-Night, Sister! Four panels trace a comic misunderstanding: a young man named Jimmie is told by Polly's father that she can only be "a sister" to him. Jimmie takes the instruction literally — kissing her goodnight as a brother would — and lands face-first in a barrel with a resounding *SMACK!* Sterrett's linework is energetic and elastic, his figures rubbery, his sound effects physicalized with star-bursts and dust clouds. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* ran in Hearst syndication for decades, and Sterrett's increasingly abstract, Cubist-influenced Sunday pages made it one of American newspaper comics' most formally inventive strips — part of the daily and Sunday page tradition that directly seeded the comic book format.