Penny Ante—"Cats and Dogs"

Jean Knott's *Penny Ante* strips appeared in newspapers as single-panel and multi-panel gag comics during the early 1910s. This Sunday page demonstrates the visual conventions that defined newspaper comics: speech balloons carrying rapid-fire jokes, multiple characters in an office setting, and simple line work suited to newsprint reproduction. The strip's humor turns on wordplay and logical absurdity—here, a debate over whether a "little dog" and "big dog" can eliminate all pairs in a card game, compared to the relationship between cats and dogs. Such strips, running daily and weekly in papers nationwide, established the template for comic narrative: recurring characters, panel sequencing, and dialogue-driven comedy that would soon migrate into comic books.