Penny Ante—Looking for a Victim

Gene Knott's *Penny Ante* strips followed street-corner hustlers and con men navigating urban life through card games and small-time schemes. Here, Eddie warns off a potential mark, asserting the group's code: never reveal the rules, and always play for money. The strip's visual vocabulary—multiple panels, overlapping speech balloons, caricatured faces—was typical of newspaper comics that emerged from the Sunday funnies. By the 1910s, recurring characters and episodic narratives in daily strips established the formal grammar that would define comic books: sequential art using panels, dialogue, and visual gags to drive narrative forward.