Top o' the Mornin' by W. D. Nesbitt

This Sunday page demonstrates the formal innovations of early newspaper comics: multiple narrative strips arranged in a grid, dialogue balloons, recurring characters, and sequential panels that advance gags across a single layout. Nesbitt's strip employs domestic and social humor typical of the era—misunderstandings, marital comedy, and character-driven situations—rendered in pen and ink with sharp line work. The page mixes wordplay with visual punchlines, using panel borders and spatial arrangement to control pacing and reveal. Published in the first decade of the twentieth century, such pages established the visual grammar and serialized format that would become foundational to comic books.