Penny Ante by Gene Knott

A Sunday newspaper comic strip featuring five men at a poker table engaged in competitive banter. The strip demonstrates the visual conventions of early comics: multiple speech balloons overlapping dialogue, varied panel sizes, and caricatured facial expressions that convey personality and emotion. The recurring characters and their specific traits—boasting, deflection, skepticism—anchor the humor in established personality types. By the 1910s, newspaper comics had become a standardized form using panels, balloons, and character consistency to tell jokes across sequential frames. *Penny Ante* exemplifies how the Sunday funnies functioned as both entertainment and visual innovation, establishing graphic narrative techniques that would define the emerging comic book medium.