Ethics of Sport—Pinochle

This Sunday comic strip by Clare Briggs uses a split-panel format to contrast gentlemanly behavior with poor sportsmanship during card games. The left panels show a composed player announcing high hands with dignity; the right panels depict an ungracious loser making excuses and attributing victory to luck. Briggs employs sequential art conventions—repeated settings, speech balloons, and character expressions—to deliver social commentary through visual narrative. As a pioneering comic strip artist of the early 1900s, Briggs helped establish the visual language of newspaper comics, influencing the development of the medium that would eventually spawn the modern comic book industry.