A topper in comic strip parlance is a small secondary strip seen along with a larger Sunday strip. In the 1920s and 1930s, leading cartoonists were given full pages in the Sunday comics sections, allowing them to add smaller strips and single-panel cartoons to their page.
Billy DeBeck's Barney Google (October 7, 1934), a page featuring two toppers: Bunky and the single-panel Knee-Hi-Knoodles.
A comic strip is a sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with daily horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in newspapers, while Sunday papers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the advent of the internet, online comic strips began to appear as webcomics.
Richard Newton Progress of a Scotsman 1794 (British Museum)
Thomas Rowlandson after G.M.Woodward. Opinions on the Divorce Bill 1800 (Metropolitan Museum, New York)
Thomas Rowlandson My Wife 1815 (Metropolitan Museum New York)
Illustrated Chips (1896). Harmsworth titles enjoyed a monopoly of comics in the UK until the emergence of DC Thomson comics in the 1930s.