Daily Breakdowns 038 - The Family Circus

The Family Circus Vol. 1: 1960-61
By Bil Keane
Published by IDW Publishing. $39.99 USD

Sometimes it's good to have your illusions shattered.

I'm 40 years old. And as long as I can remember, The Family Circus has been a comic I had no use for. I don't even remember it, and yet I know I regularly read the comics in the The Chicago Tribune as a kid. Hell, even at eight or nine I was reading terrible, adult-oriented strips like Fred Basset and The Lockhorns, but The Family Circus was uncool even for an eight-year-old. At twelve, I would take the Sunday strips and, with some Wite-Out, recaption the cloying "jokes" of Jeffy & Co into something dirty (or maybe draw a turd coming out of the back of their footie pjs). I wanted no part of their innocence, and in fact wanted to defile it.

So it was with no small sense of irony for a father of two trying to protect his own children's innocence, and with a great deal of pleasure, that I find out The Family Circle wasn't always so squeaky clean. Oh, don't get me wrong, this isn't Mad Men or anything, but there are some similar, "if we only knew" moments in the single panel gags here. The dad smokes, has a cocktail, and occasionally gets fully drunk, though that's hinted at more in strips where the whole family is waiting for him to come home at night with an excuse for why he's late, or when he's at the breakfast table with a hangover icepack on his head.

Although not as strong a cartoonist, Keane has a wider range of gags than fellow family humor strip cartoonist Hank Ketcham's Dennis the Menace, and the kids are less knowingly obnoxious. They're just being kids, and gags emerge organically from their innocent lack of restraint, their dealing with the technology of the day, their resourceful repurposing of household items (like using a fan to fly a kite indoors), their grasp (or lack of same) of adult idioms and concepts, and their exasperating, expensive and messy forms of play. The mother here, modeled closely on Keane's own Australian bride, Thel, generally suffers stoically. No laughs for her. She also closely resembles a Wii avatar. Dad, on the other hand, gets the occasional gag when he clumsily attempts to handle trying parenting situations, or when he's actively hostile, such as when he dumps a fresh load of sand outside the empty sandbox, so that this time the kids can shovel the sand into the box.

Keane seemingly has an inexhaustible supply of solid visual and verbal gags, with very few obviously repeated ideas. It's understandable given the single panel format, and the period, that the jokes are never character-based, but it's a little curious he doesn't attempt to give different traits to the kids, or even have them argue with each other. They're a completely unified front, aside from one panel where the youngest one, Jeffy, runs into the living room, naked, to the delight of Mom's lady friends, and older brother Billy tells sister Dolly that that will be "a hard act to follow."

It's a wholesome enough strip, and it's clear that Keane observed his children not just for material but with great affection, but there is a welcome sense of reality here--abandoned later in the strip--that parenting is often exhausting, embarrassing, and a pain in the ass. Not just an archival work one reads out of a sense of history and duty, it's more often than not very funny stuff.

Christopher Allen

A copy of the book was provided by the publisher for purpose of review.