Old Doc Yak

This Sunday strip follows Doc Yak through a six-panel sequence as he attempts to remove his shirt, only to have it catch fire in the final panel. The humor builds through physical comedy and visual escalation—a hallmark of early newspaper comics. Doc Yak's oversized head and expressive features anchor each panel, while speech balloons and sequential panel borders guide readers through the gag. The strip exemplifies how Sunday pages of the 1910s developed the visual language that would define comic books: recurring characters, panel-to-panel narrative flow, and sight gags rendered through line work and proportion. Strips like this appeared in hundreds of newspapers, establishing the medium's vocabulary before the first comic books were ever published.