Keeping Up with the Joneses

A Sunday newspaper strip following the competitive social lives of neighboring families. The Joneses engage in escalating displays—new automobiles, skating, fashionable clothes—while their counterparts scramble to match their status. The strip employs the visual vocabulary that newspapers had standardized by 1913: sequential panels arranged in rows, speech balloons carrying dialogue and internal monologue, recurring characters with distinct appearances, and exaggerated body language for comedic effect. Published during the explosive growth of the Sunday funny pages, *Keeping Up with the Joneses* capitalized on middle-class anxieties about consumption and social position, establishing a format that would become foundational to comic strip storytelling and eventually the comic book medium itself.