‘Family Circus’ creator Bil Keane dies at 89

AMANDA LEE MYERS

Asso­ci­ated Press

PHOENIX — Bil Keane’s “Fam­ily Cir­cus” comics enter­tained read­ers with a sim­ple but sub­lime mix of humor and tra­di­tional fam­ily val­ues for more than a half cen­tury. The appeal endured, the author thought, because the Amer­i­can pub­lic needed the consistency.

Keane, who started draw­ing the one-panel car­toon fea­tur­ing Billy, Jeffy, Dolly, P.J. and their par­ents in Feb­ru­ary 1960, died Tues­day at age 89 at his long­time home in Par­adise Val­ley, near Phoenix. His comic strip is fea­tured in nearly 1,500 news­pa­pers across the country.

Jeff Keane, Keane’s son who lives in Laguna Hills, Calif., said that his father died of con­ges­tive heart fail­ure with one of his other sons by his side after his con­di­tioned wors­ened dur­ing the last month. All of Keane’s five chil­dren, nine grand­chil­dren and great-granddaughter were able to visit him last week, Jeff Keane said.

“He said, ‘I love you’ and that’s what I said to him, which is a great way to go out,” Jeff Keane said of the last con­ver­sa­tion he had with his father. “The great thing is Dad loved the fam­ily so much, so the fact that we all saw him, I think that gave him great com­fort and made his pass­ing easy. Luck­ily he didn’t suf­fer through a lot of things.”

Jeff Keane has been draw­ing “Fam­ily Cir­cus” in the last few years as his father enjoyed retirement.

Keane said in a 1995 inter­view with The Asso­ci­ated Press that the car­toon had stay­ing power because of its con­sis­tency and simplicity.

“It’s reas­sur­ing, I think, to the Amer­i­can pub­lic to see the same fam­ily,” he said.

Although Keane kept the strip cur­rent with ref­er­ences to pop cul­ture movies and songs, the con­text of his comic was time­less. The ghost-like “Ida Know” and “Not Me” who deferred blame for house­hold acci­dents were sta­ples of the strip. The family’s pets were dogs Barfy and Sam, and the cat, Kittycat.

“We are, in the comics, the last fron­tier of good, whole­some fam­ily humor and enter­tain­ment,” Keane said. “On radio and tele­vi­sion, mag­a­zines and the movies, you can’t tell what you’re going to get. When you look at the comic page, you can usu­ally depend on some­thing accept­able by the entire family.”

Jeff Keane shared the sen­ti­ment, say­ing “Fam­ily Cir­cus” had flour­ished through the decades because read­ers con­tinue to relate to its val­ues of fam­ily moments.

“It was a dif­fer­ent type of comic, and I think that was my dad’s genius — cre­at­ing some­thing that peo­ple could really relate to and wasn’t nec­es­sar­ily meant to get a laugh,” he said. “It was more of a warm feel­ing or a lump in the throat.”

Keane’s friend Charles M. Schulz, the late cre­ator of “Peanuts,” once said the most impor­tant thing about “Fam­ily Cir­cus” is that it is funny.

“I think we share a care for the same type of humor,” Schulz told The Asso­ci­ated Press in 1995. “We’re both fam­ily men with chil­dren and look with great fond­ness at our families.”

Keane said the strip hit its stride with a car­toon he did in the mid-1960s.

“It showed Jeffy com­ing out of the liv­ing room late at night in paja­mas and Mommy and Daddy watch­ing tele­vi­sion and Jeffy says, ‘I don’t feel so good, I think I need a hug.’ And sud­denly I got a lot mail from peo­ple about this dear lit­tle fella need­ing a hug, and I real­ized that there was some­thing more than just get­ting a belly laugh every day.”

Even with his tra­di­tional motif, Keane appre­ci­ated younger car­toon­ists’ efforts. He listed Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” among his favorites, and he loved it when Bill Grif­fith had his off­beat “Zippy the Pin­head” char­ac­ter wake up from a bump on the head think­ing he was Keane’s Jeffy.

Keane responded by giv­ing Zippy an appear­ance in “Fam­ily Circus.”

Born in 1922, Keane taught him­self to draw in high school in his native Philadel­phia. Around this time, young Bill dropped the sec­ond “L” off his name “just to be different.”

He worked as a mes­sen­ger for the Philadel­phia Bul­letin before serv­ing three years in the Army, where he drew for “Yank” and “Pacific Stars and Stripes.” He met his wife, Thelma (“Thel”), while serv­ing at a desk job in Australia.

He started a one-panel comic in 1953 called “Chan­nel Chuck­les” that lam­pooned the up-and-coming medium of tele­vi­sion. (In one, a mom in front of a tele­vi­sion, cry­ing baby on her lap, tells her hus­band: “She slept through two gun fights and a bar­room brawl — then the com­mer­cial woke her up.”)

He moved to Ari­zona in 1958 and two years later started a comic about a fam­ily much like his own. Keane and his wife had a daugh­ter, Gayle, and sons Glen, Jeff, Chris and Neal — one more son than in his car­toon family.

“I never thought about a phi­los­o­phy for the strip — it devel­oped grad­u­ally,” Keane told the East Val­ley Tri­bune in 1998. “I was por­tray­ing the fam­ily through my eyes. Every­thing that’s hap­pened in the strip has hap­pened to me.

“That’s why I have all this white hair at 39 years old.”

Thelma Keane died of Alzheimer’s dis­ease in 2008 and was the inspi­ra­tion for the Mommy char­ac­ter in the comic strip.

When his wife died, Keane called her “the inspi­ra­tion for all of my suc­cess. …When the car­toon first appeared, she looked so much like Mommy that if she was in the super­mar­ket push­ing her cart around, peo­ple would come up to her and say, ‘Aren’t you the mommy in ‘Fam­ily Circus?’”

She also served as his busi­ness and finan­cial manager.

Ari­zona and Keane had a mutual influ­ence on each other. Keane’s work can be found all around — from children’s cen­ters to ice cream shops.

Like­wise, Ari­zona could also be found in Keane’s work.

A 2004 comic saw the fam­ily on a scenic look­out over the Grand Canyon with the chil­dren ask­ing “Why are the rocks painted dif­fer­ent col­ors” and “What time does it close?”

Jeff Keane said those mem­o­ries endure.

“He was just our dad. The great thing about him is he worked at home, we got to see him all the time, and we would all sit down and have din­ner together. What you see in the ‘Fam­ily Cir­cus’ is what we were and what we still are, just dif­fer­ent generations.”

Posted by AP News on Nov 9 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.