From the exhibition
Old Doc Yak Collects His Bill
· 1912

A Sunday newspaper comic strip featuring Old Doc Yak, a goat character in striped pants who pursues payment from a debtor across multiple panels. The strip demonstrates early comic-strip conventions: recurring character, sequential panels showing cause and effect, speech balloons, and physical comedy. Doc Yak chases his customer through various obstacles—a streetcar, a ditch, traffic—in an escalating sequence of slapstick gags. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics of this era derived visual language from earlier broadsheets and illustrated serials, combining word and image to tell self-contained stories. Artist Sid Smith's work appeared in Sunday pages nationwide, helping establish the comic strip as mass entertainment during the medium's formative years.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain