Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's Sunday page demonstrates the full vocabulary of early newspaper comics: multiple self-contained gags stacked vertically, speech balloons, recurring characters, and dense captioned text below each scene. The strip's layout—six or more independent jokes per page—reflects the Sunday supplement's appetite for variety and rapid punchlines. Nesbit's figure work and crosshatching style typify the illustrative standards that newspaper comics inherited from nineteenth-century wood engraving. This format, distributed to hundreds of papers nationwide, established visual storytelling conventions that would define American comics for decades.