Old Doc Yak

Old Doc Yak, a goat character piloting an automobile numbered 348, races through a landscape in this Sunday newspaper comic strip. The narrative unfolds across eight panels: the doctor boasts of his driving skills, then loses control, crashes into trees and rocks in a series of escalating collisions, and finally skids into a ditch. Artist Honey Swanell employs sequential panel layout, speech balloons, and sound effects (HONK!, SCATT!, BAM!) to convey action and comedy. The strip exemplifies early newspaper comics' visual vocabulary—repeated characters, slapstick gags, and dynamic motion lines—that established the foundational grammar of the medium before the rise of comic books.