Polly and Her Pals — October 28, 1922

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* runs here as a four-panel daily. Pa has done something scandalous the night before; Ma has promised to forget it. In panel one he's relieved. By panel two Susie notes Ma made a fool of herself too. Then Ma declares she *has* forgotten — only to spend the remaining panels loudly reminding everyone of precisely what she's forgotten, culminating in a thrown shoe and a resounding PLONK! The strip's comedy is purely structural: the loop of denial feeding repetition. Sterrett launched *Polly* in 1912 and became one of the era's most inventive page designers, his Sunday pages dissolving into near-abstract geometry. These Hearst and syndicate dailies — cheap newsprint, tight deadlines — are the direct ancestors of the comic book format: recurring cast, sequential panels, speech balloons carrying the full dramatic load.