The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's *The Top o' the Mornin'* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic supplement at its height. The page combines multiple narrative strips—"An Alphabet of Jokes," "Pulchritude," "Dutch Appeal to Him," and others—with joke panels and illustrated short fiction, all competing for reader attention. Speech balloons carry character dialogue; sequential panels advance gags through clear visual progression. Recurring types appear across strips: the dandy, the working man, romantic couples. This miscellaneous format, popular from the 1890s through the 1910s, established visual conventions—panel borders, expressive line work, caricatured faces—that would define comic art for generations. The Sunday page was laboratory and marketplace both, where artists refined techniques that would become the grammar of the modern comic book.