Old Doc Yak

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* follows a cantankerous goat through slapstick encounters with human characters. The strip employs the visual conventions now standard to comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and physical comedy escalating across the page. Smith's economical line work and clear staging made the strip accessible to newspaper readers of all ages. Published in the Sunday funny pages when comic strips were still establishing their visual language, *Old Doc Yak* demonstrates how early cartoonists used panel progression and recurring characters to sustain narrative momentum across multiple frames. The strip's popularity helped establish the newspaper comic as a distinct medium, bridging the gap between single-panel gags and the serialized storytelling that would define the comic book.