Keeping Up with the Joneses

This Sunday strip follows the competitive social dynamics of two neighboring families through sequential panels and recurring characters. The strip employs speech balloons, thought bubbles, and visual gags—a vocabulary of cartooning that emerged from newspaper comics in the early 1900s. The narrative unfolds across panels showing family members attempting to outdo one another, a theme that resonated with urban middle-class readers. By 1914, the Sunday newspaper page had become the primary venue for comic strips, preceding comic books by decades. Artists working in this format—using layout, gesture, and dialogue to advance stories—essentially invented the visual grammar that would define the medium for generations.