Keeping Up with the Joneses

This Sunday strip follows the social competition between neighbors, a recurring theme in early newspaper comics. The narrative unfolds across four panels: a neighbor boasts of her full gentlemen callers, prompting Mrs. Jones to attempt keeping pace through increasingly absurd schemes. The strip employs established conventions of the era—sequential panels, speech balloons, and domestic comedy—that became foundational to comic strip storytelling. Running from 1913 onward, *Keeping Up with the Joneses* exemplified how newspaper comics translated the visual gags and character-driven humor of vaudeville and illustrated humor magazines into a new sequential art form that would directly influence the development of comic books.