From the exhibition
Polly Sleepyhead
· February 17, 1907

This Sunday newspaper strip follows Polly and her father through a sequence of comic misadventures on a seesaw. The six-panel layout uses a consistent perspective and setting to track the story's progression: Polly's nap interrupts playtime, Billy arrives to help, and the seesaw mechanics create physical humor as characters ascend and descend. The strip employs speech balloons, sequential panel construction, and a recurring cast of child characters—visual conventions that were crystallizing in newspaper comics of this era. Sunday strips like this one, published in major papers nationwide, established the narrative and graphic language that would define comic strips and eventually the comic book medium itself.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain