Polly and Her Pals — "Ring One Up for Paw!"

Four panels track Paw Perkins's unanswered question through a chain of deflections: a hula-costumed Polly brushes him off, a pipe-smoking gentleman pleads ignorance, Aunt Susie invites the query, and Paw finally delivers his punchline — why do men give women diamond engagement rings? The answer, implied by the final panel's coal-clutching figure, lands as a thrifty-husband joke. Sterrett's draftsmanship is notably fluid: figures lean and overlap, speech balloons integrate naturally into dense cross-hatching, and facial expressions carry the comic rhythm. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* pioneered the recurring-cast domestic strip format that syndicated dailies spread nationwide, establishing the visual conventions — panel grids, character continuity, balloon dialogue — that would directly seed the first comic book anthologies of the 1930s.