Cartoonist Still Drawn to ‘Family Circus’

The first cartoon appeared in 19 newspapers on Feb. 29, 1960. It was a drawing of a census taker filling out a form and asking the woman of the house:

“Any children?”

The woman looks puzzled. Two dirty handprints of a child ring the doorknob. Assorted toys, a tricycle, volleyball, baseball and bat litter the floor and sofa.

Three decades later, cartoonist Bil Keane, 67, continues to chronicle the lighter moments of American family life. But today, many more families share those moments. “Family Circus” now appears in 1,434 newspapers throughout the nation and the world.

For years, “Family Circus”--the cartoon that appears inside a circle--has been the most widely circulated syndicated comic panel in existence. Every day, it is read by more than 100 million people; readership polls consistently rank it among the top three comics in the United States.

Keane’s cartoon characters are household names and remain the same age year in and year out: PJ, 18 months; Jeffy, 3; Dolly, 5; Billy, 7; and the ageless Mommy and Daddy.

“I don’t just try to be funny,” said Keane. “Many of my cartoons are not a belly laugh. I go for nostalgia, the lump in the throat, the tear in the eye, the tug in the heart.”

Keane was interviewed recently in his studio in the ranch-style desert home where he and his wife, Thel, moved when they left Pennsylvania in 1959. Avid tennis players and swimmers, they have a pool and tennis court in their spacious back yard.

Family life has taken some dramatic swerves in America since Keane began drawing “Family Circus.” Yet, the cartoonist hasn’t altered his point of view.

“The pendulum has swung pretty far out. Some may look on my work as being corny or old hat and wonder if my observations on the typical family are passe, what with the single-parent family and mixed family units,” mused Keane as he put finishing touches on his latest panel.

But “Family Circus,” a single-comic panel drawn inside an unconventional circle instead of the usual rectangle, appears to be in tune with America, adding new newspapers all the time.

Over the years, 48 books of selections from Keane’s daily panels and Sunday comic strip of “Family Circus” have been published. More than 14 million copies of the books have been sold.

In 1971, Keane and his neighbor, Erma Bombeck, collaborated on one of the books, “Just Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own.” In a forward to another of Keane’s books, Bombeck wrote: “Mostly I admire and respect Bil’s gentleness, his warmth, his respect for that battered, floundering, much-maligned institution--the American family.”

In his book “Family Circus Treasury,” Keane observed: “A reader once wrote she would be shattered if she learned that Bil Keane was a bachelor and not the father of a brood of small children.

“This gives me an opportunity to set the record straight. I would like to state I am indeed an eligible bachelor, quite handsome, and I hate kids. I would like to state that but my wife is proofreading this copy and I’ll never get away with it.

“The truth is I have been happily married to Thel (Carne), my Australian bride, since 1948. We have five children whom I love dearly and have exploited mercilessly for my cartoons.”

Characters in Keane’s comic panel are based on members of his family. Keane himself is the bespectacled and often befuddled Daddy, Thel is Mommy, and PJ, Billy, Jeffy and Dolly are composites of their four sons and one daughter, and now, four grandchildren. Other real-life relatives, including Keane’s mother, Florence, the comic’s gray-haired grandmother, also pop up from time to time.

“Although we live in the desert, I show the family living in a typical mid-U.S., split-level house,” said Keane. “Rather than pinpointing any particular part of the country as a place where the family lives, I would prefer to have readers think we live just down the street from their own home.”

Keane was born in Philadelphia and grew up in suburban Crescentville, Pa. He graduated from Northeast Catholic High School in 1940. “I did cartoons for four high school publications and then and there decided I wanted to spend my life at the drawing board,” he recalled. He had hoped to go to art school but his parents could not afford to send him.

Working as a messenger at the Philadelphia Bulletin after high school, Keane “got to sit down at the edge of drawing boards of artists.” As a soldier in World War II, he sold cartoons to a national magazine and worked as a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes. He met Thel in Brisbane.

Keane returned to the Philadelphia Bulletin from 1945-59, but continued to free-lance cartoons to magazines, producing a local comic strip for the Bulletin called “Silly Philly” and a syndicated comic strip, “Channel Chuckles,” that lampooned television. The latter ran in 200 papers at its peak and had lasted 21 years when Keane retired it in 1975.

The 5-foot-9 1/2, 145-pound cartoonist moved to Paradise Valley 31 years ago “because we were sitting in a pollen pocket in Bucks County, Pa., where I was bothered by allergies and constantly sneezing. In Arizona, I seldom sneeze.”

There have been three TV specials based on Keane’s comic characters. And, for the past three years, the cartoonist has been producing twice-monthly inspirational posters that hang in more than 4,000 elementary schools across the nation.

Thel and Bil’s daughter, Gayle, 40, runs a Sacramento floral shop called Bloomingayle’s. Son Neil, 38, is a computer design engineer in Los Angeles; Glen, 35, is a animator for Disney Studios; Chris, 33, is a feature writer for the Santa Cruz Sentinel; and Jeff, 32, lives in Laguna Nigel and helps his father with the panel and Sunday comic strip.

“Jeff pencils some of the drawings, roughs the art, finishes it. If I retire, get too ill to do it or die, Jeff will continue the feature,” said Keane, who, at 67, entertains no thought of retiring. “Why should I quit when I enjoy what I’m doing? I plan to continue to draw as long as they’re able to prop me up at a drawing board.”

Keane keeps a drawer in his desk filled with hundreds of ideas for future panels written on 3-by-5 cards. “Any time I get an idea, I jot it down. Often, I wake up in the middle of the night with a brainstorm and write that down. Not one of the more than 10,950 panels I have done in the last 30 years are alike. I have enough material here to keep Jeff going for years,” he said.

His wife, who handles the business side of the Keane comic, is the model for the comic strip’s Mommy as well as his tennis partner. “Thel looks at everything before I send it to the syndicate. Thel is the inspiration for a lot of things, a lot of the philosophy behind ‘Family Circus’ comes from her,” said Keane.

Keane considers life as a successful comic cartoonist “a dream job . . . King Features Syndicate splits the revenue 50-50 with me. Some papers pay as little as $5 a week, others in excess of $200 a week for the comic, depending on circulation,” he explained. “I’m my own boss, make my own hours. (But) I put in long hours every day. It’s a tedious and exacting craft.

“Cartoonists are like film producers. I am in full control of all my characters. I decide who I want to say the lines. I’m the script writer. I do the costumes. I direct the scenes. I edit it. The whole thing is produced by me. I try to keep it as contemporary looking as possible, as up-to-date as tomorrow.

“I cannot believe that I have made my career so many years doing what a lot of people would like to do as a hobby, drawing cartoons and getting paid well to do it.”