The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbitt's *The Top o' the Mornin'* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic page at its height. Multiple self-contained strips—"May Make One," "Holding It In," "Man of Capacity," and others—share a single page, each using sequential panels, speech balloons, and visual gags to tell brief narratives. The drawings employ clean linework and exaggerated figures typical of early-20th-century newspaper cartooning. These pages were the direct precursor to the comic book; the formal vocabulary of panels, dialogue, and recurring comic scenarios that would define the medium originated in daily and Sunday newspaper runs like this one, distributed to millions of readers before any bound collection existed.