The Top o' the Mornin'

W. D. Nesbit's *Top o' the Mornin'* exemplifies the Sunday newspaper comic page at the turn of the twentieth century. The strip employs sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters—visual conventions that newspapers were standardizing into a grammar of comics. Multiple strips and gags appear on a single page, including topical humor, domestic comedy, and character-driven narratives. The dense layout reflects how Sunday papers used comics to attract and retain readers, offering variety and serialized entertainment. Such pages became the direct precursors to collected comic books, establishing both the artistic vocabulary and the business model that would define the medium.