The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbitt's *Top o' the Mornin'* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic page at its height: multiple self-contained strips stacked and columned across the page, each telling a brief story in four to six panels. The strip employs the visual vocabulary now standard to comics—sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring characters—that emerged from newspaper competition in the 1890s. Here, scenes of domestic life, romance, and social comedy unfold through economical line drawings and dense text. This format, appearing in Sunday supplements nationwide, established the grammar that would define comic books when they collected these newspaper strips into bound volumes decades later.