From the exhibition
Old Dog Yak: Bill Collector
· 1913

This Sunday strip follows a bill collector's misadventures with an irascible yak character, employing the visual grammar that defined early newspaper comics: sequential panels advancing a continuous narrative, speech balloons for dialogue, and recurring character types. The artist uses exaggerated gestures and slapstick action across nine panels to sustain comedic momentum. The strip exemplifies how Sunday pages functioned as self-contained stories within the larger newspaper format. Animal-character strips like this one populated the funny pages of the 1910s, offering accessible humor through physical comedy and simple conflicts. The formal innovations here—panel borders, readable lettering, balanced compositions—became foundational to comic strip and eventual comic book design.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain