Keeping Up with the Joneses

This Sunday strip follows a family's competitive efforts to match their neighbors' possessions and status. The narrative unfolds across four panels: neighbors discuss German foxes, a character attempts boar hunting with a rifle, and escalating schemes to acquire matching animals. The strip exemplifies the visual vocabulary pioneered by newspaper comics—sequential panels advancing a joke, speech balloons conveying dialogue, and recurring middle-class characters navigating modern consumer culture. Created during the medium's formative years, it reflects both the formal innovations that would define comics and the social anxieties of early twentieth-century American life.