Keeping Up with the Joneses

This Sunday strip follows a domestic couple through six panels of escalating social competition. The husband resists his wife's spending habits; she counters with comparisons to neighbors and threats of leaving. The gag structure—setup, objection, escalation, resolution—became standard for newspaper comics. Artist Pop Momand's strip, which debuted in 1913, introduced the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" to popular speech. The visual grammar here—sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring characters in domestic settings—derives from the comic strips that emerged in American newspapers around 1900. These Sunday pages and daily strips formed the immediate precursor to comic books, establishing both the narrative techniques and the publishing infrastructure that would define the medium for decades.