Penny Ante—Sympathizing With the Tightwad

Jean Knott's *Penny Ante* appeared in newspapers as a daily strip featuring recurring characters in comic scenarios. This panel shows friends playing cards and sharing tall tales about gambling windfalls, rendered in the bold pen-and-ink style typical of early newspaper comics. The layout employs multiple speech balloons and sequential action to build the gag—a structural approach that became standard in comic strips. By the 1910s, newspaper comics had established the visual vocabulary later adopted by comic books: panel division, word balloons, and character consistency across installments. *Penny Ante* exemplifies how newspaper strips pioneered these techniques that would define the medium for decades.