Keeping Up with the Joneses

This Sunday strip follows a family's comic misadventures as they attempt social climbing through imitation and competitive consumption. The narrative flows across six panels with consistent character placement and sequential action: a father's boastful scheme unravels through mishap and humiliation. Speech balloons advance plot and character voice, while cross-hatching defines form and movement. *Keeping Up with the Joneses* exemplifies the newspaper comic strip's golden age—when Sunday pages and daily strips became laboratories for visual storytelling. Artists developed the grammar still used today: panel borders, word-image integration, and recurring characters that built reader loyalty across years of publication.