PHOENIX — Bil Keane’s “Family Circus” comics entertained readers with a simple but sublime mix of humor and traditional family values for more than a half century. The appeal endured, the author thought, because the American public needed the consistency.
Keane, who started drawing the one-panel cartoon featuring Billy, Jeffy, Dolly, P.J. and their parents in February 1960, died Tuesday at age 89 at his longtime home in Paradise Valley, near Phoenix. His comic strip is featured in nearly 1,500 newspapers across the country, including The Denver Post.
Jeff Keane, Keane’s son who lives in Laguna Hills, Calif., said his father died of congestive heart failure with one of his other sons by his side after his conditioned worsened during the past month. All of Keane’s five children, nine grandchildren and great-granddaughter were able to visit him last week, Jeff Keane said.
“He said, ‘I love you’ and that’s what I said to him, which is a great way to go out,” Jeff Keane said of the last conversation he had with his father. “The great thing is Dad loved the family so much, so the fact that we all saw him, I think that gave him great comfort and made his passing easy. Luckily he didn’t suffer through a lot of things.”
Jeff Keane has been drawing “Family Circus” in the past few years as his father enjoyed retirement.
Bil Keane said in a 1995 interview with The Associated Press that the cartoon had staying power because of its consistency and simplicity.
“It’s reassuring, I think, to the American public to see the same family,” he said.
Keane said the strip hit its stride with a cartoon he did in the mid-1960s.
“It showed Jeffy coming out of the living room late at night in pajamas and Mommy and Daddy watching television and Jeffy says, ‘I don’t feel so good, I think I need a hug.’ And suddenly I got a lot of mail from people about this dear little fella needing a hug, and I realized that there was something more than just getting a belly laugh every day.”
Born in 1922, Keane taught himself to draw in high school in his native Philadelphia. Around that time, young Bill dropped the second “L” off his name “just to be different.” He worked as a messenger for the Philadelphia Bulletin before serving three years in the Army, where he drew for “Yank” and “Pacific Stars and Stripes.” He met his wife, Thelma, while serving at a desk job in Australia.
He moved to Arizona in 1958 and two years later started a comic about a family much like his own. Keane and his wife had a daughter, Gayle, and sons Glen, Jeff, Chris and Neal — one more son than in his cartoon family.
“I never thought about a philosophy for the strip — it developed gradually,” Keane told the East Valley Tribune in 1998. “I was portraying the family through my eyes. Everything that’s happened in the strip has happened to me.”
