In Channel Chuckles , Keane explored the then new medium of television and its impact on everyday life. The strip often referenced real television shows such as I Love Lucy and television personalities including Jackie Gleason and Jack Parr. The majority of the strips are dated with only months and days and not specific years. These strips are grouped together as circa and circa Also, in this group there is a box of cartoons circa.
Box 1 contains a folder of biographical information donated by Bil Keane and a folder of Channel Chuckles circa that are numbered but undated.
The final series is The Family Circus which consists of daily and 98 Sunday cartoons from Of particular interest is the first Family Circus panel which debuted on February 29, In these early strips the father was named "Steve" which was later changed to Bill. Also included are some of the earliest strips featuring PJ who was introduced in August At the end of the series are 3 cartoons with page numbers.
Several of the panels have overlays in red marker and other panels have notations in blue pencil about color. The strips were done in ink on illustration board. Several The Family Circus cartoons contain vellum overlays colored with red marker. Also, traces of blue pencil as well as pasteovers are present.
For each title, daily and Sunday cartoons are arranged separately in chronological order. The majority of our archival and manuscript collections are housed offsite and require advanced notice for retrieval. Researchers are encouraged to contact us in advance concerning the collection material they wish to access for their research. Written permission must be obtained from SCRC and all relevant rights holders before publishing quotations, excerpts or images from any materials in this collection.
After the War, he and Thel continued a relationship, mostly long distance, until when Keane returned to Brisbane to marry her. Back in his home town in the U. At various times, Keane produced other comic features, mostly short-lived and none in syndication — The Master, about a put-upon father; The Suburban Set , about typical family life in the suburbs; and The Silent Set, a pantomime panel. He kept this up for 13 years.
It continued for the next 22 years until In April , shortly after moving from Pennsylvania to Arizona, Keane approached his syndicate with another cartoon idea. Called Spot News, it was a pantomime gag that highlighted some recently reported event. It debuted in June but began to fade by fall. Now, he had arrived at a subject he was intimately familiar with. By , he and Thel had produced five children, four boys and their older sister—a circumstance fraught with gag material for a family-focused cartoon.
Those Keane boys, gluttons for punishment. Keane had christened the cartoon The Circle Family, but his editor at the syndicate thought The Family Circle would be better.
Within six months of its launch, the cartoon attracted the attention of the legal department at Family Circle magazine, which threatened to sue. The color Sunday installment first appeared September 10, , and Keane ended Silly Philly and stopped freelancing cartoons to magazines to concentrate on Channel Chuckles and The Family Circus. In the early years of the cartoon, the paterfamilias has a somewhat different look—a much more bulbous nose being the most conspicuous. The gags focused on a constantly bemused, bewildered, and often put-upon dad.
But the father of The Family Circus was no dupe: he was simply an ordinary dad, and over the ensuing years, he eventually looked more and more like Bil Keane.
And in deference to her model, Thel, she always had a superb figure. Keane himself dabbled in animation, overseeing the production of three tv specials starring The Family Circus. Compared to what it would become, in fact, it was downright cynical about the way child rearing can be its own special prison.
Naturally, being so gooey and simplistically, unflappably square—even in a somewhat staid medium like the newspaper comics—made Keane and The Family Circus a frequent target for ridicule. But allow me to point out the obvious: if other cartoonists could make a family-oriented comic that was as popular as The Family Circus, they would have done it. Bil was a misunderstood creative genius who knew how to write for his target audience.
He was also a great guy. I was a big fan. Keane knew exactly what he was doing. Going from to day from funny, to a warm loving look, to a commentary, and even to inject religion into the feature.
I was a kid growing up in a troubled household. We didn't have books in the house, but we did have the daily paper, and I remember picking out The Family Circus before I could really read. There was something about looking through a circle at a life that looked pretty good to me. For kids like me, there was a map and a compass that was hidden [in] The Family Circus. The parents in that comic strip really loved their children. He put that image in my head and it stayed with me.
I'd always heard that great art will cause people to burst into tears, but the only time it ever happened to me was when I was introduced to Bil Keane's son Jeff. William Aloysius Keane was born Oct. Self-taught as an artist, he started out imitating the style of New Yorker cartoonists in the late s. His parents could not afford to send him to art school, so after high school he worked as a messenger at the Philadelphia Bulletin newspaper — and observed the staff artists.
Keane also sold cartoons to a national magazine and met his future wife while stationed in Brisbane, Australia, where they shared office space. He married the native Australian in From to , he was a staff artist for the Philadelphia Bulletin and continued to free-lance as a cartoonist. After a decade in Roslyn, Pa. Working at home as a free-lance cartoonist, he realized that most of his humor revolved around family life and small children, he later said. Another son, Glen, is an animator best known for his work at Disney.
Keane created three animated specials for television and published more than 40 books. Keane is survived by his five children, Gayle, Neal, Glen, Christopher and Jeff; nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Valerie J.
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