Penny Ante: Taking Off a Kitty

Gene Knott's *Penny Ante* captures a card game mid-hand, where players banter about a recurring gag: one gambler habitually forgets to remove his winnings from the pot. The strip's six panels move through dialogue and reaction shots, using speech balloons and expressive caricature to carry the humor. *Penny Ante* exemplifies the newspaper comic strip format that emerged in the 1900s—a serialized, character-driven medium that borrowed visual techniques from earlier comic papers and refined them for daily syndication. By the 1910s, such strips had become a fixture of Sunday and weekday editions, establishing the panel layout, lettering conventions, and comedic timing that would define American comics for decades.