Old Doc Yak

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* exemplifies the anthropomorphic animal strips that dominated early newspaper comics. This Sunday page follows the irate goat doctor through a domestic crisis—his adopted son has vanished. Smith employs the standard visual vocabulary of the era: sequential panels, speech balloons, and expressive body language to convey narrative and humor. The strip's episodic structure, mixing sight gags with ongoing character situations, became the template for countless newspaper serials. *Old Doc Yak* ran from 1904 to 1917, helping establish the Sunday comics page as a mass-market entertainment form that would directly influence the emergence of the comic book in the 1930s.