Old Doc Yak

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* strips the Sunday comics down to their essentials: a recurring character, sequential panels joined by dialogue balloons, and gags built on visual repetition. Here, Doc Yak searches for a missing boy—the narrative unfolds across twelve panels, each advancing plot and joke through picture and word together. Smith's economical line work and clear panel progression became foundational to how comic strips told stories. Published in newspapers as both Sunday features and daily installments, such strips created the formal vocabulary that would later define the comic book: the speech balloon, the guttered sequence, the character arc played across frames.