Penny Ante

A Sunday comic strip by Jean Knott depicting five men at a card table engaged in a casual game. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions that had crystallized in newspaper comics by the 1910s: sequential panels, speech balloons advancing the narrative, and recurring characters in comedic situations. Here, the dealer proposes a novelty rule to raise the stakes, prompting reactions from his companions—one excited, one skeptical about losing money. Knott uses exaggerated facial expressions and body language to convey personality and humor. The strip's domestic setting and focus on wordplay and social mishap reflect the ordinary-life subjects that made newspaper comics accessible to mass audiences and established the medium as a vehicle for visual storytelling.