2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 16: SQUAWK! SQUAWK!

We now enter the 9th Circus of Hell.

Just like Jim Davis' Garfield, Bil Keane's Family Circus is one of those long-running newspaper comic strips that has inspired dozens and dozens of parodies already. I've certainly done my share. Above is just one example. There's something about Family Circus that invites parody. It's so wholesome and old-fashioned and corny that, if you're a cynical person like me, you feel almost honor-bound to subvert it in some way. You want to drag it through the mud. That's what I'm doing here, turning a typical FC panel into some kind of mini horror movie.

 Here's another example, this one a bit more melancholy.

All dads must feel like this sometimes. Including yours. And mine.

And one last one before I go.

Out of the mouths of babes, huh?

Take away the characters, and 'Family Circus' becomes a haunting series of still-life images (UPDATED)

Disused Jungle Gym (2016)

Where have they gone, the lovable, melon-headed characters who normally populate The Family Circus? Where are rambunctious Billy, inquisitive Dolly, sensitive Jeffy, and dear, sweet, hopeless PJ? For that matter, where are their parents: long-suffering Thel and checked-out Bill? All of them seem to have mysteriously vanished. Were they raptured into Heaven to be with their dear departed Grandfather? It's unknown, but the world they inhabited -- at least the buildings, furniture, and other non-living objects -- seem to be just fine. Perfectly intact. It's a puzzler, this one. But aren't these images eerily beautiful?

The Lonely Ottoman (2016)

The Rack (2016)

Couch on the Edge of Oblivion (2016)

UPDATE: Just in case you followed a link from somewhere else to get here, I thought I'd add a couple more of these that I've done over the years. As always, enjoy.

Stille Nacht (2018)

Confusing Doors (2017)

George Wilson cannot enjoy even the smallest of victories

An expanded Dennis The Menace cartoon.

In his landmark 1993 book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud stated that single-panel newspaper features like Bil Keane's The Family Circus do not qualify as comics because they lack sequential juxtaposition, i.e. the very feature that defines comics as a unique medium. I wonder what Mr. McCloud might make of Hank Ketcham's Dennis The Menace. From Monday to Saturday, Dennis is (usually) a single-panel feature with a very limited cast in a very defined setting. On Sundays, it expands to a multi-panel layout. And, every once in a while, the thankless artists who do the strip today (Ketcham died in 2001) will divide one of the daily panels into halves. So Dennis The Menace is occasionally a comic and occasionally not a comic. It is the Schrodinger's cat of the cartoon world. I think it should be a multi-panel feature every day. Sometimes, when there's just one panel to work with, the joke is not really complete. Today's Dennis is a perfect example. You see it up there at the top left. It needed a couple more panels to be whole. So I added them.