Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's *Top o' the Mornin'* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic page at the turn of the century. The strip combines multiple narrative strips and standalone gag panels—a format that dominated newspapers before the modern comic book. Each section uses sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters to tell brief humorous stories. The dense layout reflects how Sunday comics functioned as complete entertainment supplements, mixing jokes about contemporary life, character-driven humor, and visual slapstick. This page format and its visual language—panel borders, expressive line work, and integrated text—became the foundational grammar that would later define the comic book industry when these newspaper strips were collected and reprinted in bound form.