Polly and Her Pals — October 11, 1922

Four panels follow a household catastrophe: a woman's operatic singing practice—rendered in wild phonetic squiggles (*OU-OEE-FEE-AWWK*)—drives a man outdoors to the window sill, where he explains to a neighbor that he sits there "for an alibi" so the neighbors can see he isn't beating her. Sterrett's linework is restlessly energetic, packing sound effects into the very air around his characters. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the earliest strips to develop a stable ensemble cast and to treat panel composition as genuine graphic design. Sterrett later pushed the strip toward near-abstract backgrounds and cubist distortion, influencing a generation of cartoonists who would carry newspaper-strip conventions directly into the first comic books of the 1930s.