Penny Ante by Jean Knott

A newspaper comic strip following a group of boys in a high-stakes game of chance. The strip uses sequential panels with speech balloons to advance a single joke: one player has only thirty-two cents left and proposes betting everything on one hand to "show down" the odds. The competing players debate the fairness of including odd chips in the pot. Penny Ante exemplifies the daily comic strip format that emerged in early twentieth-century newspapers—a form that established the visual vocabulary of modern comics: bordered panels, naturalistic figure drawing, and overlapping dialogue that reveals character through speech. Such strips, appearing in dozens of newspapers nationwide, became the training ground for artists developing the language that would define comic books.