Old Doc Yak

This Sunday page from *The Chicago Tribune* follows Doc Yak, an anthropomorphic goat in a top hat, through a domestic dispute with his wife. The strip employs the visual conventions now standard to comics: sequential panels, speech balloons advancing plot and character, and physical comedy built on repetition and escalation. Doc Yak and similar animal-character strips of this era—appearing in Sunday funny pages and daily newspapers—established the grammar of sequential art that would define the emerging comic book form. The recurring cast of talking animals, drawn in simple but expressive line work, gave readers a reason to follow the strip daily, creating the habit of newspaper comics consumption that would sustain the industry through the twentieth century.