The Top O' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's *Top O' the Mornin'* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic page at the turn of the twentieth century. The strip deploys multiple narrative panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters—visual conventions that emerged from sequential illustration and would become foundational to comic books. Here, varied episodes stack vertically and horizontally across the page, each telling a self-contained gag or sketch. The drawing style combines caricature, slapstick action, and period typography. These Sunday pages, appearing in newspapers nationwide, served as laboratories for the visual language that would define comics: the panel grid, character continuity, and the marriage of image and text to drive narrative and humor at speed.