Polly Sleepyhead

This Sunday strip follows Polly through a dreamlike sequence in which Native American figures pursue her across a landscape. The six-panel layout demonstrates the visual conventions emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential panels advancing a narrative, expressive figure drawing, speech balloons, and action lines conveying motion. The strip's reliance on slapstick and metamorphosis typified the humor of early 1900s comic pages, which evolved directly into the visual language of later comic books. Sunday supplements in major newspapers served as laboratories for developing the panel-based storytelling grammar that would define the medium.