Family or scary circus?

By Mark Costello
Collegian Editor
February 7, 2007

What’s Family Circus’s problem been lately? I remember being an impressionable youth and reading the comics as a substitute for Dr. Seuss books or whatever it is I was perusing. My little eyes could make it through all the longer, panel strips, but, like most kids, I was drawn to to the more graphic-intensive strips. Non-Sequitur by Wiley Miller was usually funny on some level I could understand, and even though it’s a poor substitute for Gary Larson’s The Far Side, as an adult, I still enjoy it. Simply put, Non-Sequitur has aged well, like a fine wine or cheese. Its next door neighbor in the Philadelphia Inquirer, however, seems to have putrefied.

It used to be cute, right? Maybe I’m just remembering it through the rose-tinted glasses of youthful indifference, but I remember poignant strips about the kids imagining their deceased grandfather in heaven, fanciful Sunday strips in which one, or all, of the kids would leave a wild, tick-mark trail around the neighborhood and the occasional week-long gag where Bil Keane supposedly had his kid draw the strip for him. It was cute, I was a kid and I loved it.

But high holy heaven, what’s become of it now? A quick glance at the Inquirer’s Monday, Feb. 5 strip shows one of the kids commenting on an atlas not having any streets printed in it. And, not to make a hasty generalization, but all of the strips are that bad anymore. It’s truly become a circus, and in the chaos, something sweet’s lost. Where’s the endearing humor of yore? Where are the adorable characters, the clever punch lines (all right, maybe the strip was never clever, but it was cute, in its own way)?

Indeed, I lament the loss of classic Family Circus. And by that, I mean I miss a Family Circus that made a lick of sense occasionally, or made me go, “Aww!” instead of, “...what?”

Come on, Bil Keane. Pull it together.

costellom4@lasalle.edu