Old Doc Yak

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* follows a cantankerous goat through domestic mishaps in a Sunday newspaper strip format. Here, Doc Yak's house catches fire—a cascade of panels showing the chaos: the owner's insurance woes, the dog's refusal to help, mounting panic, firefighters' arrival, and finally Doc Yak's dismayed reaction to the damage and resulting bills. The strip uses sequential panel composition, speech balloons, and exaggerated cartoon figures to build comedic momentum. Smith's work exemplifies the visual vocabulary emerging in early-1910s newspaper comics, where recurring characters, multi-panel narratives, and sight gags drove readership and established templates that would define the medium for decades.