The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's *Top o' the Mornin'* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic strip at the turn of the twentieth century. The page combines multiple short gags—*The Clown's Jest*, *Mildred's Memory*, *Diplomatic*—alongside longer narrative strips, a layout standard for Sunday supplements seeking to attract diverse readers. Nesbit employs sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and clear visual storytelling to develop jokes and situations. The strip's Irish-inflected humor and sentimental domestic scenarios typified period comic content. These newspaper pages, appearing in millions of Sunday editions, established the formal and narrative conventions that would define comic strips and eventually comic books.