Archive: Family Circus

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Shoe, 6/17/09

The thing that most unsettles me about Shoe is of course its occasional portrayal of “sexy” lady birds, but the “goggle-eyed look of horror reaction shot” is a close second, especially since the punchlines in this strip are generally good-natured jokes about everyday life and not, say, an announcement of existential crisis. For instance, going by today’s text alone, I’d guess that this is supposed to be some wry commentary on how low the resale value is for all those expensive consumer goods we buy, and what’reyagonnado, amiright? But the way that our two characters are looking at each other in undisguised shock in the final panel implies that this sale of the Perfesser’s possessions was a last-ditch effort to raise funds that they desperately needed, and that the bad men will be coming to cut off their thumbs shortly.

Family Circus, 6/17/09

Wow, this week’s “Little Billy, Age 7” cartoons sure are extra harrowing, aren’t they? I have no idea where Big Daddy Keane’s day job is supposed to be or why Billy is there with him, but the meaning of his display of violence is fairly clear. “See what I did to the machine, when it didn’t give me the bag of Funyuns that I paid for? Well, just think of what I’m going to do to you and your sister and your idiot brother if I don’t get the [kick] God [kick] damned [kick] peace and quiet [kick] I deserve [kick] once in a while!”

Sally Forth, 6/17/09

Ah, a mother’s love! It encourages us to speak in the sweet, comforting voice of LIES. Really, Sally, if Hillary always “do[es] great” on her finals, then why, after 27 years, has she still not advanced to the sixth grade?

Dennis the Menace, 6/17/09

“So I thought you might want to stab him with this, to teach him not to shoot off his big mouth.”

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Family Circus, 6/16/09

The Family Circus isn’t just a beloved refrigerator decoration for old people everywhere; it’s also an elaborate long-running narrative experiment, challenging our notions of hard and fast divisions between “reality” and “fiction.” The Family Circus family has a very strong resemblance to the real-life family of Bil and Thelma Keane; the parents are modeled very closely on them, and the kids are as well, though not as closely as you might think — there are actually five real-life Keane kids, and the only daughter, whose childhood nickname was Dolly, is in real life older than the Billy analogue, whose real name is Glen. The strip father’s job is also supposed to be a cartoonist; you do see him sometimes working in a home studio, but he also appears to leave for some kind of office job during the day. Then there’s strips like this one, where pretend-Billy takes over for pretend-Daddy in the comics drawing business, which implies that the comic is actually produced by one of its own characters, like a snake vomiting up its own tail, even though the actual end result has traditionally been drawn by real Bil and not real Glen. Add into the madness the fact that for some time the real artist of the strip has been the real Jeff, though there is the fiction (see what I did there?) that Bil is still doing it; real Jeff looks remarkably like pretend-Jeffy and yet seems determined to portray pretend-jeffy as a moron whenever possible.

Try to keep all this in mind and you’ll be left with a serious headache when trying to figure out who might be responsible for today’s panel on the several different layers of fiction, metafiction, and reality that it simultaneously occupies. And that’s too bad, because, when you cut through all that, the content of today’s panel is pretty delightful, containing at is does the pretend-Keane parents (or the pretend-pretened-Keane parents) getting into a screaming fight because LOOK AT ALL THESE FUCKING BILLS and WHY DON’T YOU GET A REAL JOB and MY MOTHER SAID NOT TO MARRY YOU and so on. Of course, the real Keanes never had arguments like this, because of those aforementioned old people and their insatiable lust for Family Circus-branded merchandise. But nobody wants to put a crudely drawn panel of Mommy and Daddy lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills on their refrigerator.

Luann, 6/16/09

The punchline of this strip would be kind of cute if Brad did in fact have any other friends, but as it is it’s just kind of depressing.

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Blondie, 6/13/09

Oh look, it’s yet another Blondie where I’m left wondering exactly how I’m supposed to assemble the various elements into a pleasing joke-like whole. Does Dagwood refer to the order-taker as a “clown” because of the semi-conscious association resulting from his giving his order into a molded-plastic clown head? Are we supposed to think that Dagwood is so dumb that he believes that a literal clown is taking his order? Or is a literal clown in fact taking his order — some poor bastard with clowning experience who was willing to answer any job ad, any job ad at all, only to find himself shackled and put into some kind of stocks and forced to hawk greasy food to folks in their cars? It would certainly explain the desperation he exhibits at being unable to move sufficient quantities of product.

I have already expressed my admiration for Clown Burger’s “Say — then pay!” motto. Few corporations are as willing to explain how a simple economic transaction works on such a basic level: “First you must tell us what it is you wish to purchase, through a speech act of some sort; then you must supply some medium of exchange to us.”

Family Circus, 6/13/09

Uh-oh, it looks like Billy has discovered philosophy, or perhaps has been listening in to the conversations of stoned college students! Either way, the blank, expressionless faces of his siblings shows just how well fancy brain-thinkin’ goes down in the Keane Kompound. A swift but brutal beating will soon teach him that the only kind of utterances permitted here are prayers or adorable malapropisms.