Old Doc Yak

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* follows a goat doctor through encounters with human neighbors in this Sunday newspaper strip. The narrative unfolds across nine panels with speech balloons and sequential art—visual conventions that newspaper comic strips standardized in the early 1900s. Smith's character-driven humor relies on recurring personalities and situational comedy. The strip exemplifies how Sunday funny pages became laboratories for comic timing and panel layout, establishing visual grammar that cartoonists refined throughout the decade. Smith's work appeared in major newspapers and influenced the graphic storytelling conventions that would define comic books when they emerged in the 1930s.