Keeping Up with the Joneses

This Sunday strip follows a household's domestic misadventures through four sequential panels, establishing sight gags around pet ownership and household management. The strip uses a grid layout with speech balloons to advance narrative action—a visual system that became foundational to American comics. *Keeping Up with the Joneses*, which debuted in 1913, exemplified the newspaper comic strip's evolution from single-panel cartoons into sustained character narratives. Artist Pop Momand's work helped establish recurring domestic characters and suburban settings as staple comic properties, directly influencing the visual storytelling conventions that would define the medium for decades.