From the exhibition
Penny Ante: The Guy Who Buys as He Goes
· June 30, 1916
Jean Knott's *Penny Ante* follows a hapless shopper on a spree, buying stacks of chips at a poker game. The strip uses the visual vocabulary newspapers had standardized by 1916: panels arranged in sequence, speech balloons anchored to speakers, and exaggerated expressions to telegraph emotion. Recurring characters—the banker, the eager buyer—trade rapid-fire dialogue in a scene of social comedy. The strip exemplifies how newspaper comics evolved from isolated gags into narrative sequences, establishing the formal grammar that would define comic books decades later.
Public domain, restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain
