Penny Ante — Ladies' Night

Jean Knott's *Penny Ante* comic strip exemplifies the Sunday newspaper page format that shaped early comic art. The strip employs the visual vocabulary of sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring domestic characters to build narrative momentum across a single gag. Here, a husband's anxious question about household expenses triggers a wife's cheerful threat to raise him again—a setup-and-punchline structure typical of pre-1920s newspaper humor. Knott's linework and figure construction reflect the cartooning conventions of the daily and Sunday pages, the training ground where comic art developed its fundamental language before the comic book industry emerged in the 1930s.