Polly and Her Pals — 1925-01-07

In this four-panel daily from *Paw Solves It* — the weekday companion to Cliff Sterrett's *Polly and Her Pals* — a woman dictates a letter asking for advice while a flustered older man (Paw) counts syllables on his fingers: "one, two, three, four, five, six." The punchline lands in the final panel: "That's my six-letter word for *suggest*!" Sterrett's draftsmanship is clean and economical, his speech balloons shaped to character voice. Launched in 1912, *Polly and Her Pals* was among the first newspaper strips to feature a recurring female lead and to push panel composition toward near-abstract Art Deco geometry. Such daily strips, syndicated nationally, supplied the reprint anthologies of the 1930s that became the first comic books.