The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's *Top o' the Mornin'* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic page at its peak: multiple self-contained gag strips stacked vertically, each built from 2–4 panels with dialogue balloons. "Heredity," "Unselfish," "Diplomatic," and "One Way Out" demonstrate the format's economy—establishing character and conflict in a single panel, resolving tension through pratfall or punchline by the strip's end. Recurring characters and domestic situations anchor reader familiarity week to week. Typography, pen line work, and sequential panel layout—conventions that would define comic books for decades—emerge here as the visual grammar of newspaper comics, where daily and Sunday pages served as the primary training ground for artists inventing the medium.