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?

A whole year's worth of comics parodies and mashups!

A gloomy year demands a gloomy header image.

As recently as 2019, comic parodies were a regular feature on this blog. Then, without warning, they vanished altogether. What happened? Well, it's like this. Up until about December of last year, I was an active participant in a Facebook forum devoted to newspaper comics. I shared my various mashups and parodies there and then collected them into occasional blog posts here at Dead 2 Rights. When I gave up on the Facebook forum, I stopped doing comics-related posts on this blog, too.

But I never stopped reading newspaper comics or doing parodies of them. I just don't do them in such great quantities as I used to. Now it's late December, and I have a folder on my hard drive full to bursting with comics, so I thought I'd share them all at once. Sound good to you? Let's go.

Christmas Holiday Yuletide Comics Roundup Spectacular!!

No, that's not Paulie Walnuts! It's Mary Worth!

Christmas is mere days away, and I have nothing to give you except some comics parodies. Try not to look disappointed. It's been a lean year.

A spooktacular comics roundup, part 2

Enjoy never sleeping again.

Before you go out trick-or-treating, I invite you to cleanse your palette with some seasonally appropriate comic strip parodies.

Time for a spooktacular Halloween comics roundup!

These people are not trick-or-treaters! Do not open your door to them!

The frost is on the pumpkin, the leaves are on the ground, and the kids are all back in school having their spirits broken. That's right, fall is underway! And I have such a limited imagination that I can't think of a better way to celebrate autumn than with another comics roundup! So let's rake some comics into a big pile and then dive in!

Sure, let's do a comics roundup! What's the worst that could happen?

Let's just jump into it.

As another summer fades into autumn, blah blah blah... here are some comics. Is it mostly Mary Worth again? Yeah, probably.

It's an old-fashioned summertime comics roundup! (Part 1)

Sadly Priscilla's Pop is not one of the strips covered in the following article.

Hey, y'all! How's your summer going? That's nice.

I don't know about you, but I'm in the mood to throw some more newspaper comics onto the rusted-out Weber barbecue grill in the backyard and char them to cinders. Does that sound like fun? Okay, then. Let's get to it.

Comics are fun for everybody! Let's read some now!

Batman is not in this article. This image is lying to you.

I know I just did a comics roundup a few weeks ago, but I figured it would be a nice change of pace to post something non-Ed Wood-related to this blog. So let's dive in and swim, huh?

Another roundup of comics parodies by Joe Blevins

Remember these?

Well, folks, it's that time again. The long-running comic strip Mary Worth has just wrapped up another glacially paced story, so I figured it was time to do another assortment of comics parodies, takeoffs, and spoofs. I've accumulated quite a few of these over the last few months.

Is it already time for another comics roundup? Apparently.

Yep. In colors. Plural. We're going all out here.

Look. If you read this blog, you already know the deal. Occasionally, I like to clear off the images I have saved to my computer and start fresh. Specifically, these are various parodies of newspaper comics that I've done over the last couple of months. That's what this is. Not into that? Then this isn't the article for you. Move on to something else.

Random cartoon time, gang!

For a while, there was an outbreak of mismatched hands in comic strips.Victims included Mark Trail and Wilbur Weston.

Happy day after Labor Day, everyone! And guess what? I have another backlog of comics and cartoons I want to delete off my hard drive, so I'm dumping them all into one big post here at Dead 2 Rights. Enjoy or don't. It's your call. Either way, after today, they're gonzo.

Let's light this candle.

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)

The existential ennui of Jeffy

Alone. Why must he be alone?

Context is everything. Bil Keane's heartwarming Family Circus is a single-panel feature, meaning that we really only get to see a few seconds of the characters' lives at a time. Maybe if we saw what happened right before and right after, we'd have a different view of the proceedings. So it is with today's cartoon. Jeffy is really only there to be a sounding board for Dolly. But what if the larger, more interesting story were all about Jeffy? That's what I've tried to convey here.

Speaking of recontextualizing the funnies, here's my pitch for a spin-off of Crock.  It'd be about the adventures of a imaginative, rambunctious boy and his best friend, a sassy talking vulture. You might think this looks a little familiar, but trust me -- it's all original, baby.

Nothing second-hand about this.

And just to round things out, here's a little comic I pieced together out of panels from Mark Trail and Rex Morgan, M.D. Enjoy.

You'd best not talk to Jules that way, June.

2016: The year in uncollected comics parodies

My tribute to the sidekicks and second stringers of the comics page.

See that tab up there, the one that says "Comics Fun!" right under the main banner? Click on that, and you'll find all the various comics-related posts on this blog. Generally, these are little spoofs and mashups of long-running newspaper comics, including (but not limited to): Dennis The Menace, Garfield, The Lockhorns, Rex Morgan, M.D., Hagar The Horrible, Blondie, Marvin, Shoe, Six Chix, and Funky Winkerbean.

I post a lot of that stuff to Twitter and Facebook, but not all of it makes it to Dead 2 Rights. So occasionally, I like to do a little roundup of comics stuff I've done recently and semi-recently. That way, people who don't follow me on social media will get to read it. That's what this post is. I was going through the files on my computer, deleting a lot of mages that I don't need anymore, and I came across some of these comics parodies. I figured, this would be an easy way to get some extra mileage out of them.

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.

Another heartwarming 'Mark Trail' adventure

Mark seems like he'd be a fun dad, right?

Rather like Batman, nature writer and adventurer Mark Trail has his very own creepy orphan to look after. The motherless waif in Mark's life is named Rusty Wilson, and he's been a part of the venerable Mark Trail comic strip since 1981. Mark officially adopted Rusty over twenty years ago, but the little ingrate still refers to his benefactor by his first name after all these years instead of calling him "Dad." With his off-putting personality and misshapen, rat-like face, Rusty has been a favorite in-joke/whipping boy among Trail-heads for decades. The strip itself often forgets about the little creep for weeks at a time, which is probably for the best. In the episode above, I imagine what the dynamic between Mark and Rusty is like when the cameras have been turned off, so to speak.

Oh, and here's a bonus Family Circus episode featuring that long-running strip's most pitiful character: red-headed middle child Jeffy.

Just eat what you're given, Jeffy.