From the exhibition
Old Doc Yak Gives Elephant's Hoofs to a Mule
· March 6, 1912

This Sunday strip follows Doc Yak, a recurring anthropomorphic character, through a nine-panel sequence of slapstick medical mishap. The narrative flows left to right across the page, using speech balloons and sequential panels—visual conventions that had solidified in newspaper comics by the early 1910s. A patient seeking a cure receives elephant hooves grafted onto his legs, with predictably chaotic results. The strip's dense, sketchy linework and cluttered compositions typify the era's Sunday funnies aesthetic. *Old Doc Yak* exemplifies how newspaper comic strips functioned as laboratories for narrative form, establishing panel-driven storytelling and character repetition that would become foundational to comic book language.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain