Polly and Her Pals — PO350109

Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* launched in 1912 and ran for decades as one of America's most visually inventive newspaper strips. This daily — titled *Stealing Pa's Thunder* — shows Pa attempting winter snow-bathing, boasting of willpower over cold, while other characters observe with skepticism. The gag resolves with Pa seated on an electric heating pad, exposed as a fraud. Four horizontal panels carry the joke cleanly through setup, complication, reveal, and punchline. Sterrett's linework is loose and expressive, the speech balloons crowd productively, and the strip's signature vernacular dialogue — *"hull week," "shiverin'"* — drives character as much as drawing does. Strips like this one were the direct prototype for the comic book page: the panel grid, recurring cast, and balloon-driven narrative that anthology comics simply reprinted and then imitated.