Keeping Up with the Joneses

This Sunday strip follows the domestic misadventures of a middle-class family through six connected panels. A husband alerts his wife to an invitation, prompting increasingly frantic scenes as she scrambles to prepare—donning a spotted dress, searching for their daughter Susie, managing household chaos, and finally greeting neighbors with forced cheer. The strip uses sequential panels, speech balloons, and expressive linework to develop a narrative across the page. Strips like this appeared in hundreds of newspapers during the 1910s, establishing the visual vocabulary—recurring characters, domestic humor, panel progression—that would become fundamental to comic books. The newspaper Sunday and daily pages were the primary laboratory where artists invented and refined the medium's visual grammar.