Polly and Her Pals

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the most formally inventive strips in American newspapers. This daily strip, titled "Now Pa's Got to Get Another One," runs five panels: Pa smuggles a Christmas present past Ma, who orders it straight to the closet; Pa then hunts the absent kids through the house; the final panels reveal a small child gleefully riding the hidden gift — presumably a rocking horse — down the hallway, while Pa bellows "Whoa Horsie!" Sterrett's clean linework and expressive character silhouettes exemplify the daily newspaper strip format that directly seeded the comic-book anthology. Syndicates like Newspaper Feature Service, credited here, industrialized that distribution, standardizing the panel grid that comic books would inherit wholesale within two decades.