Penny Ante

Jean Knott's *Penny Ante* exemplifies the Sunday comic strip tradition of the 1910s, where newspaper pages hosted self-contained gag narratives. Here, Eddie and friends engage in a poker game over odd chips—a setup allowing multiple characters to riff on variations of the same joke across sequential panels. The strip employs the visual grammar now fundamental to comics: bordered panels advancing time, speech balloons carrying dialogue, and recurring characters in consistent situations. The loose linework and expressive faces reflect the era's cartooning style, where Sunday comics served as both entertainment and advertisement for newspapers themselves. Such strips were the direct ancestors of the comic book format.