The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's *The Top o' the Mornin'* appeared in the Sunday newspaper pages as a multi-panel comic strip with recurring characters and interconnected gags. The page combines large illustrated scenes with dialogue and narrative text, employing sequential art to tell separate but thematically linked stories: "Elizabethan Roughness," "Her Plan," "Fable of the Foolish Girl," and others. Speech balloons and panel borders direct reader attention across the composition. The strip's style—ink drawings with detailed costumes and facial expressions—typified early newspaper comics, which developed the visual vocabulary of panel layout, character consistency, and visual storytelling that would define the emerging medium. Sunday color sections and daily strips were the primary laboratory for comic art innovation in the early 1900s.