Penny Ante

Jean Knott's *Penny Ante* strips the formal pretense from card games among working men. Here, a dealer and five players negotiate stakes and strategy in rapid-fire dialogue across six panels. The comic employs the standard visual vocabulary of early newspaper strips: sequential panels, expressive line work distinguishing each character, and speech balloons carrying colloquial banter. The gag hinges on accusation and deflection—a sign of weakness in poker, wasted time, the pot split—played for knowing laughs among readers familiar with card rooms. Published in the era when daily and Sunday newspaper comics functioned as genuine mass entertainment before the emergence of the comic book format, *Penny Ante* demonstrates how cartoonists like Knott used recurring situations and character types to anchor reader interest across multiple installments.