Keeping Up with the Joneses

Pop Momand's *Keeping Up with the Joneses* ran as a daily and Sunday strip from 1913 to 1938, following the competitive social aspirations of the McGinis family against their neighbors. This four-panel sequence showcases the strip's characteristic humor: characters navigating tea service rituals and one-upmanship through consumer goods and fashionable behavior. The strip exemplifies the newspaper comic's visual vocabulary—sequential panels, speech balloons, recurring characters in domestic settings—that helped establish comics as a mass medium. Momand's observations of middle-class anxiety and material consumption resonated with early twentieth-century audiences and influenced generations of comic strip artists working within the newspaper page's constraints.