Polly Sleepyhead

This Sunday comic strip follows young Polly through a series of misadventures involving a large basin of water. The nine-panel layout demonstrates the visual storytelling conventions emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential panels showing cause and effect, speech balloons conveying dialogue, and recurring characters in a domestic setting. The strip's humor relies on slapstick and exaggerated reactions typical of the period. Published in the newspaper Sunday pages, such strips were foundational to comic art—establishing the panel-and-balloon grammar that would define the medium and eventually lead to the comic book format of the 1930s onward.