The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's *Top o' the Mornin'* appeared in Sunday newspaper supplements as a full-page comic strip, featuring multiple sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring character types. The strip uses the visual conventions that had emerged from the Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids—distinct panel layouts, expressive linework, and sight gags dependent on sequential narrative. The page integrates poetry, illustrated stories, and advertisements alongside the comic panels, typical of the Sunday funnies format that bridged nineteenth-century illustration and modern comics. Nesbit's work exemplified how newspaper comics developed a visual vocabulary of timing, gesture, and panel-to-panel action that would become foundational to the comic book medium.