Polly and Her Pals — "Pa Wins the 'Kitty'"

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and became one of the most visually inventive strips in American newspaper syndication. This daily strip follows Pa Perkins, the blundering patriarch, who encounters a large black cat crossing his path and declares himself ruined by bad luck — only to discover the creature is "Chessy," a missing movie cat with a $500 reward posted by the Phlicker Film Co. Four compact panels carry the gag from superstition to windfall, deploying Sterrett's characteristic loose, energetic linework and phonetic dialect in the speech balloons. Sterrett's formal experiments on the Sunday pages — fractured geometry, Art Deco patterning — influenced generations of cartoonists. The daily strip shown here demonstrates the tight comedic economy that made newspaper comics the direct precursor to the comic book format.