The Naps of Polly Sleepyhead

This Sunday comic strip follows a child character through a series of misadventures involving a well and makeshift vehicles. The nine-panel grid demonstrates the formal conventions emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential narrative told through uniform rectangular frames, dialogue rendered in speech balloons, and visual gags that depend on panel-to-panel progression. The strip's reliance on recurring characters and episodic plotting typifies the Sunday page format that flourished in American newspapers in the early 1900s. These serialized strips, distributed through newspaper syndicates, established the visual grammar and narrative structures that would define comic books when they emerged as a distinct medium two decades later.