Old Doc Yak

A Sunday page from Old Doc Yak, Sidney Smith's popular strip about a goat and his jalopy. The narrative follows Doc Yak's efforts to retrieve a new car from fresh suds, leading to a chase through the countryside. Smith employs sequential panels with speech balloons to track action and gags across the page—visual techniques refined in newspaper comics of the 1910s. The strip demonstrates how Sunday pages used multiple tiers to expand storytelling beyond the daily format, building comic tension through repeated vehicle pursuits and sight gags. Old Doc Yak ran from 1914 to 1925, establishing patterns of character-driven slapstick that shaped early American comic art.