Penny Ante: The Afternoon Game

Jean Knott's *Penny Ante* depicts a card game disrupted by a woman's forgotten errand and the arrival of Mrs. Spiffkins with her automobile. The strip employs the visual vocabulary of early newspaper comics: multiple panels, speech balloons anchored to speakers, and recurring characters in domestic situations. Published during the Sunday and daily newspaper era that established sequential art as mass entertainment, *Penny Ante* exemplifies how newspaper comics developed narrative momentum through panel-to-panel continuity and character interaction. The strip's humor derives from social interruption and the competing claims of domestic obligation and leisure—themes common to the comic strips that preceded and shaped the comic book form.