Old Doc Yak

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* follows the misadventures of a goat who drives a motorcar through the streets, pursued by a traffic cop. The strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary that newspaper comics had crystallized by the 1910s: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, slapstick gags tied to motion and speed, and expressive figure drawing that conveys action and personality. Smith's crisp line work and clear panel layout made the humor legible across the Sunday and daily pages that reached millions of readers. By this period, newspaper comic strips had become America's primary form of sequential visual narrative, establishing conventions that would directly influence the comic books that followed.