Old Doc Yak

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* strips exemplify the Sunday newspaper comic format at its peak. The strip employs a nine-panel grid with continuous narrative flow, speech balloons, and sight gags centered on a recurring cast—the titular goat, various townspeople, and a perpetually unsold automobile. Smith's economical line work and clear sequential staging establish visual conventions that would define newspaper comics and, subsequently, the comic book format itself. The strip's episodic gag structure, reliance on physical humor, and integration of character-driven storylines across multiple panels demonstrate the sophisticated visual storytelling vocabulary already mature in 1910s newspaper pages.