Penny Ante

Jean Knott's *Penny Ante* depicts a penny-ante poker game between working men, with one player explaining the stakes to his wife through a doorway. The strip employs the standard visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics: multiple panels arranged in sequence, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and a recurring cast of characters. The gag relies on the wife's confusion over gambling terminology—mistaking a "chip" for a "nickel" and assuming the stakes are higher than they are. Knott's line work and figure drawing reflect the cartooning conventions of the 1910s Sunday pages, when serialized humor strips were establishing the foundational language of sequential art that would define the comic book form.