Doc Yak's Prescription for Railroad Disputes

This newspaper article documents a complaint filed with the Interstate Commerce Commission by the Escanaba Business Men's Association against three railroads. The defendants submitted an old Doc Yak cartoon as their response—a single-panel gag strip featuring the character's prescription for "cold feet" afflicting transportation companies. The cartoonist Sidney Smith's anthropomorphic animal characters and spare visual style typified early newspaper comics of the 1910s, which combined wit with satirical commentary on commercial disputes. Doc Yak ran as a daily strip and represented the era when comic strips first colonized newspaper pages, establishing conventions of recurring characters and visual humor that would define the emerging medium.