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Luann, 11/26/11

Ha ha, you guys, aren’t Brad and Toni the best? I’m sure seeing Toni talk vaguely about marrying Brad won’t make you puke your guts out at all. Anyway, egged on by TJ, she’s come to announce that either the fire department will hire Brad back or she’ll quit, which, since Brad also quit his job, means that their married life together will start off great, in poverty. But don’t worry! She’s about to describe the awesome majesty of their love to her boss, which will magically increase the department’s budget enough to pay them both.

Family Circus and Dennis the Menace, 11/26/11

I have to admit that I kind of love both of these panels, mostly because they appear to contain precisely zero jokes between them. Dennis has been tricked into doing yard work with the promise of fun, and he resents it; Jeffy is too stupid to operate a sink. That’s all there is! And maybe I’m in an unnaturally good mood, even after reading Luann, but that’s enough for me today.

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Family Circus, 11/13/11

Man, the disgusted look on Big Daddy Keane’s face as he realizes that his daughter views sacred communion with God as just another sordid amusement is pretty priceless. One hopes that he remains so focused on her that he doesn’t notice Billy making a wholly inept attempt to summon up the Prince of Darkness by reading the hymnal upside down.

Crankshaft, 11/13/11

Crankshaft may be old and senile and kind of deaf, and they might have finally gotten some kind of legal mumbo-jumbo that says he isn’t allowed to have all his guns anymore, but he fought the Nazis to save America and by God he isn’t going to let that God-damned Khrushchev and his commies take over his lawn.

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Bil Keane, creator of the Family Circus, died today after a long and by all accounts happy life. We owe him a debt of thanks for providing such a tempting target for mockery over the years — mockery that he was by all accounts incredibly good-natured about (he even collected Family Circus spoofs). His own sense of humor was reportedly a lot edgier than what the strip became best known for, as some of the early panels (like the one from 1960 above) demonstrate. RIP, Big Daddy Keane.

Meanwhile, little Jeffy (age 53) has been writing and drawing the strip for years now, so expect exactly zero changes on that front, and our mockery to continue unabated.