Bil Keane Gets Deep… and Kind of Generally Bleak
Submitted, unedited, for your consideration.
The Family Circus has always been pretty bland, but ever since Jeff Keane got in on the act, the strip has taken a decidedly darker, sometimes even sort of twisted, tone. The following are randomly selected Family Circus panels from the past two months, and I swear didn’t change the captions.
and today’s uncharacteristically angry:
“I like this bread the turkey ate”? It calls to mind jackals disemboweling a carcass innards and all at best, and coprophaagia at worst. Definitely not the same “Dolly-said-the-wrong-word” pabulum I’m used to. If this kind of snark is the direction Jeff Keane plans to bring the strip, I am all for it.
4 Responses to “Bil Keane Gets Deep… and Kind of Generally Bleak”
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December 14th, 2006 at 5:46 am
Why do I get the feeling looking at the last cartoon that little Billy will grow up to be like Timothy McVeigh or the Rudolph guy and one of these days, we’ll see a Keane cartoon where an adult Billy plants explosives at a woman’s clinic?
December 14th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
I saw your comment over at joshreads.com about Tinsley…don’t know if you saw this gem yet:
http://www.thetalentshow.org/images/gipper-returns.jpg
December 15th, 2006 at 1:59 am
Damn, those first two ones are actually funny!
December 16th, 2006 at 12:01 am
[...] One doesn’t ordinarily associate critical deconstruction with The Family Circus, but of late everyone’s favorite one-panel paean to 2.3 kids and a dog has taken a bit of a turn toward unconventional humor. I’d seen some inkling of this last month, when some of the captions were a little less innocent than the usual fare, and a Comics Curmudgeon comment led me to some interesting speculation on why this is so. It’s certainly plausible that Bil’s allowing Jeff more creative control over the strip than his usual inking-and-colouring duties, and it may be that the Jeff Keane era will be a little less vanilla than his father’s, when the time comes for Bil to retire. [...]