Keeping Up with the Joneses

This Sunday strip follows the competitive misadventures of the Jones family across four sequential panels. The narrative flows left to right: a domestic accident, a reckless automobile jaunt, a borrowed luxury item, and a mountain-climbing mishap. The artist employs the emerging visual grammar of comic strips—panel borders, speech balloons, and exaggerated physical comedy—to chronicle middle-class social ambition. Launched in 1913, *Keeping Up with the Joneses* became one of the era's most widely syndicated strips, establishing the template for humor comics in American newspapers. Its recurring cast and situation-based gags influenced how comic narratives would develop across the newspaper pages that preceded and shaped the modern comic book.