Polly and Her Pals — "Pa Fools Himself"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the most formally inventive strips of the early newspaper era. This four-panel daily follows Pa — the strip's true comic center — who arrives injured at the doctor's office. His wife explains she hit him with a stone while aiming at a neighbor's cat; the doctor marvels it's the first time he's known a woman to hit what she aimed at; Pa mutters she didn't. The final panel reveals Pa was standing directly behind her. Sterrett's crosshatched figures, expressive silhouettes, and tight punch-line architecture exemplify the daily strip's compression — the same visual grammar that syndicates would soon repackage into the first collected comic books of the 1930s.