Penny Ante—With Jokers

Gene Knott's *Penny Ante* comic strip follows a group of men engaged in card games and casual betting. In this panel sequence, the humor turns on wordplay and visual gags: a player passes his hand to another, confusion erupts over who holds which cards, and a mirror joke lands as the punchline. The strip employs the standard visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics—sequential panels, speech balloons, and exaggerated facial expressions. Such strips populated Sunday funny pages and daily editions in the early twentieth century, establishing the visual grammar that would define comic books. Recurring characters, sight gags, and rapid-fire dialogue made these newspaper strips accessible to mass audiences and provided the formal foundation for the medium's later evolution.