Top o' the Mornin'. By W.D. Nesbit

W.D. Nesbit's *Top o' the Mornin'* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic page at the turn of the twentieth century. The strip features multiple independent gags and narrative sequences arranged in vertical and horizontal panels with speech balloons—visual conventions inherited from European newspaper humor and refined by American cartoonists. Recurring characters appear alongside standalone comedic scenarios, mixing visual puns with verbal wit. The dense layout, combining illustrated stories with text-heavy sections and advertisements, reflects how comic strips shared page space with prose features. Nesbit's work demonstrates the medium's evolution from captioned illustrations toward sequential panel art, establishing narrative flow and character consistency that would define comic strips and eventually comic books.