with wedding bells and an ominous caption: "And then they were married..." The exact same scenario would then be re-enacted post-wedding by the now-jaded couple—with drastically different results. Starting on March 31, 1935, Belles and Wedding Bells alternated as the topper with a variant called And So They Were Never Married. Sterrett was initially the sole creator of the comic, producing both daily and Sunday strips. During the 1930s, however, Sterrett's arthritis prompted him to assign work on the daily strips to assistants Paul Fung and Vernon Greene. The daily strip ended in the 1940s. The last Sunday page, still drawn by Sterrett, was published on June 15, 1958. Influence and legacy Polly and Her Pals was the first of several comic strips about flirting pretty girls, including Edgar Martin's Boots and Her Buddies, Chic Young's Blondie and Larry Whittington's Fritzi Ritz (which later spawned Nancy). Although Polly and Her Pals was highly influential, it was never a licensing success, and it lacked the spin-off books and merchandise generated by other contemporary comic strips. The comic was not only remarkable for its creation of a new subgenre and prototype, but also for its cubism-inspired graphics. Six full-color Polly Sunday pages were prominently featured in Bill Blackbeard's The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (Abrams, 1977), representing for many modern fans their first opportunity to see the strip. It is now considered one of the masterpieces of American comic strips of the Interwar period, both for its graphic qualities and its storytelling and humor. Sterrett has been lauded as one of the great innovators of the comic strip form and is one of 16 groundbreaking cartoonists featured in America's Great Comic Strip Artists (1989, Abbeville Press) by comics historian Rick Marschall. When Polly and Her Pals was included in the Library of Congress exhibition Cartoon America, it was praised for its unique graphic style, and it is considered to be, together with Krazy Kat, the epitome of the Art Deco style in comics. It had considerable influence on many later cartoonists, including Jules Feiffer. Book editions A monthly Polly and Her Pals publication was published briefly in 1922 by Embee. Polly and Her Pals on the Farm was a 1934 collection from Saalfield Publishing. The earliest Polly strips were collected in 1977 by Hyperion Press (), while some Sunday pages have been reprinted by Kitchen Sink Press in 1990 (, nominated for