Keeping Up With the Joneses

Pop Momand's daily strip follows a middle-class family navigating social competition and consumer culture through six-panel sequences. Here, a husband balks at the fifty-dollar club membership fee while his wife catalogs neighborhood purchases—automobiles, gasoline, troubles. The strip's humor derives from domestic friction over status anxiety. The rigid panel grid, sequential dialogue, and recurring cast became foundational to newspaper comics. *Keeping Up with the Joneses* ran for decades across hundreds of papers, establishing the daily strip format that would seed the modern comic book industry. Momand's sharp observation of American social pretension gave the phrase itself to the language.