Polly and Her Pals — October 21, 1922

Four panels titled *Maybe the Readers Had X-Ray Eyes!* A young woman sends her beau upstairs to wait with her father, Paw, who shows off his bookshelf. 'Some library, ain't it?' The visitor agrees. Paw then claims to possess 'all the literary gems they is'—whereupon the books are revealed as hollow props, their spines mere facades. Sterrett's angular Art Deco linework, dynamic figure poses, and layered speech balloons show the daily newspaper strip at its formal peak. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* ran for four decades and directly seeded the comic-book format: its recurring cast, sequential panel grammar, and printed Sunday pages were the direct ancestors of the stapled pamphlets that followed in the 1930s.