Polly and Her Pals — "Paw Picks A Real Zone Of Safety"

Four panels of winter night: two figures on skis search for Pa Ash, who is discovered by a bundled Polly mid-stride — "Sufferin' Sassafras!" — then confronted near a warning sign, where Ash explains he has planted himself beside a DANGER post precisely so no one will bump his flask. Sterrett's strip, launched in 1912, was among the first newspaper dailies built around a recurring family ensemble rather than a single clown figure. His angular, high-contrast draftsmanship — silhouetted snowfields, crescent moon, bold blacks — anticipates the design sensibility later called Art Deco. The newspaper comic strip page, daily and Sunday, supplied both the audience and the visual conventions — panels, speech balloons, sequential timing — that the comic book industry would systematize from the late 1930s onward.