From the exhibition
Old Doc Yak
· December 21, 1913
This Sunday newspaper comic strip follows a child character's Christmas Eve encounter with Old Doc Yak, a goat, in a snowy forest. The narrative unfolds across nine panels with sequential storytelling: the child seeks Santa's help for gifts, mistakes the goat for a reindeer, and eventually brings the animal home for Christmas morning. The strip employs the visual conventions that define early comics—panel borders, speech balloons, and expressive black-and-white illustration. The recurring character of Old Doc Yak anchored a popular daily and Sunday strip that exemplified how newspapers serialized comic narratives in the 1910s, establishing the format that would evolve into the comic book medium.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
