Old Doc Yak Meets a Road Hog

Sidney Smith's *Old Doc Yak* strips pioneered the Sunday newspaper comic format with multi-panel narrative flow. This episode shows the titular goat character in his homemade automobile encountering a larger vehicle on a country road, told through six rows of sequential panels with dialogue balloons. Smith used simple, direct linework and recurring characters to build humor through predicament and slapstick. Published in the Tribune Company papers, *Old Doc Yak* exemplified the early 1910s Sunday page style that established foundational grammar for comic storytelling: panel borders, speech balloons, and visual gags that relied on readers' familiarity with continuing characters and their mechanical contraptions.