The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's Sunday comic strip exemplifies the newspaper page layout that defined early American comics. Multiple independent gag strips share the page—*Little Henry's State*, *The Fad*, *A Hunting Excursion*—each using sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters to tell brief humorous stories. The dense typography, hand-lettered dialogue, and ink illustrations reflect the Sunday funny pages' role as a proving ground for visual narrative techniques. By the early 1900s, the newspaper comic strip had established core conventions: panel borders for temporal sequence, captions for exposition, and character continuity across installments. These formal innovations, developed across hundreds of daily and Sunday strips, became the foundational grammar of comic art.