I used to love the Family
Circus comic strip. My favorite was
PJ, but it seems like the artist, Bil Keane, favored Jeffy, and, for some
reason I've never been able to articulate, I hated Jeffy. Even now if I see the comic somewhere, I get
angry and feel violent when Jeffy is featured.
I suppose it may have been because he was a spoiled brat, and I was
always tempted to smack him around. For his own good, of course. But it's only a comic strip, so I can't.
The weird thing is this - the comic strip was on my mind
today. I remember buying all the Family Circus paperbacks full of the
humorous antics from front to back covers.
We used to buy the books with Peanuts
and also The Wizard of Id. Early drawings of Charlie Brown and Snoopy
are creepy, to be honest, and the Knight in Wizard of Id used to embarrass me
vicariously, like his stupidity was almost too uncomfortable to watch. But I do remember one in which the knight
warned, "Sire, the peasants are REVOLTING," to which the king
answered, "They certainly are!"
After all, a good pun is never wasted, and November 8th
was Abet and Aid Punsters Day.
But the really strange thing (as I type this up on November
9th), is how very coincidental, eerily so even, memory can be. I decide to look up the spelling of Family Circus creator Keane's name,
because I knew it had an odd spelling but couldn't quite remember it
completely. As I hit the search option,
I also recalled that Bil Keane had died, and it seemed to me it hadn't been too
long ago. Maybe a year.
Bil Keane died November 8, 2011 (Abet and Aid Punsters Day,
no less).
I started remembering some of the finer moments from my own
childhood, as there were so few positive ones, and how I hoarded those Family Circus books. I must've had every one available when I was
a kid. I remembered the one drawing
about Billy over-eating the Halloween candy, so his dad started yelling at all
the kids to bring him their bags of treats immediately. I started thinking about my reaction when a
few years ago Keane featured the mother with a new hair-do, and how I never
warmed to it, though I still really liked the mom character. I also never liked the television cartoons,
the live action version of the Family
Circus, because unlike Charlie Brown whose iconic characters had excellent
voices to match, these voices were not the voices I had assigned to them in my
head. They were too indistinct and that
made them …. well …. just wrong.
I would like to think that somewhere somehow Bil Keane
reached out one more time to remind me of how much I loved and appreciated his
art, his humor, and his dedication to clean, family-friendly American life. Perhaps he has even forgiven me for hating on
Jeffy, though I still cringe every time I see the little dude in a re-run of
the comic strip.
RIP, Bil Keane. I
miss your daily wit.
