Old Doc Yak

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* follows a goat proprietor of a garage and filling station as he navigates misadventures with his jalopy and various customers. The strip demonstrates the visual vocabulary emerging in early newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, recurring characters, and slapstick humor built from mechanical mishaps. Smith's energetic linework and inventive panel compositions—including dramatic angles and dynamic movement—show how newspaper cartoonists were establishing the grammar of comics as distinct from single-panel illustration. *Old Doc Yak* appeared in Sunday and daily papers, part of the comics sections that directly preceded the comic book industry of the 1930s.