Family Circus

Bil Keane, the man behind the iconic comic strip "Family Circus" died yesterday in the age of 89. Keane died Tuesday of congestive heart failure at his longtime home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., according to King Features Syndicate, which distributes the comic.

"The Family Circus" appears in nearly 1,500 papers around the world today, making it the most widely read syndicated panel, according to King Features.

"He was so marvelous. I always felt that he had a great sense of truth," said Mell Lazarus, creator of the "Momma" strip. "He had a vivid imagination. It's one of those cannot-miss features."

Like many humorists, Keane mined his family for material. He admitted to modeling the bespectacled and often befuddled Daddy on himself. His wife, Thelma, was the inspiration for the always-loving and ever-patient mother, also named Thel.

"When the cartoon first appeared, she looked so much like Mommy," Keane told The Associated Press after his wife died in 2008, "that if she was in the supermarket pushing her cart, people would come up to her and say, "Aren't you the Mommy in 'Family Circus?'"

The children in the strip were largely composites of his own five children but PJ "is the best of all my children: cute, usually smiling, once in a while naughty," Keane told the San Jose Mercury News in 2004.

In 1954, he launched a syndicated comic strip, "Channel Chuckles" that lampooned the burgeoning medium of television. In one strip, a mother holds a bawling baby in front of the TV as she explains to the father: "She slept through two gun fights and a barroom brawl - then the commercial woke her up."

At its peak, "Channel Chuckles" was syndicated in more than 200 papers before Keane retired the strip in 1976.

After a decade in Roslyn, Pa., the Keane family moved to Arizona in 1958 because of Bil's allergies. Working at home as a freelance cartoonist, he realized that most of his humor revolved around family life and small children, he later said.

Among fellow cartoonists, Keane was known to display a hard-edged sense of humor that Lazarus described as "sardonic." Keane softened his approach for the comic strip, aided by a "tremendous memory" that made it easy to come up with ideas, he later said, and perhaps to continue to see the world through the eyes of a child.

In one panel of "The Family Circus", Jeffy holds a snapshot of his father as a boy and asks, "Mommy, when did Daddy get little?"

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