Old Doc Yak

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* exemplifies the newspaper comic strip at its height—a Sunday page featuring recurring characters engaged in visual gags across sequential panels. The strip follows Doc Yak's attempts to change a million-dollar bill, a premise that unfolds through exaggerated expressions, physical comedy, and escalating absurdity. Smith employs the formal vocabulary becoming standard in comics: bordered panels, speech balloons, and character consistency across scenes. The dentist visit gag that concludes the strip demonstrates how newspaper comics built humor through narrative progression rather than single jokes. *Old Doc Yak* ran in the *Chicago Tribune* and became a prototype for the visual storytelling that would define twentieth-century comics.