Years ago in San Francisco I was reading a small, underground comics newspaper and saw these two mock-ups of Bil Keane’s “The Family Circus.”
…and the concept charmed the pants off me. I don’t claim that my “Fambly Cirkus” ripoffs are original. Everyone hates the Keane characters — their pill-shaped heads, the nausiatingly wholesome pretext of white suburban middle class Christian values, the total lack of humour in the “punch lines,” the whole “kids say the darndest things!” formula, etc. There are certainly other people who have chosen this quintessential American comic strip as a target for cruel mockery. Browse the web for a few minutes and you’ll come across them. I felt behooved to take a stab at it myself as ornamentation for my daily diary entries. Over the months I’ve accumulated quite a collection. So it is to the “Family Circus” haters of the world whom I dedicate the following pages. Thanks also go to Lisa McColgan, Tom Tamale, my brother Pschtÿckque, Trik 2303, the Gentleman Caller, Mercy Breheny, and all the others who have assisted me with destroying Bil Keane’s awful œuvres and reconstructing them into what I like to call “The Fambly Cirkus.” le Marquis Déjà Dû, Philadelphia, 2000