Old Doc Yak

This Sunday strip follows the familiar slapstick formula of early newspaper comics: a simple premise—giving a porcupine a haircut—spirals into physical chaos across six panels. The barber and his animal client trade places, quills fly, and the joke lands on human stubbornness and the porcupine's revenge. The art uses sequential panels with speech balloons to build gag momentum, a visual structure borrowed from turn-of-the-century comic strips. *Old Doc Yak*, which ran in the 1910s, exemplified how newspaper comics pages became laboratories for the visual grammar—panel layout, onomatopoeia, exaggerated anatomy—that would define the comic book medium decades later.