The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's *The Top o' the Mornin'* appeared in Sunday newspapers as a full-page comic strip with multiple narrative threads and visual gags. The strip employs sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters to advance comedic plots—techniques that became the visual foundation of modern comics. Alongside text-heavy advice columns and satirical illustrations, the page represents the newspaper comic strip's role as a laboratory for developing panel-based storytelling. By the early 1900s, Sunday funny papers had become the mass medium through which artists and writers refined the language of sequential art that would define the comic book industry for generations to come.