Wednesday Oddball Day.
My friend Mike Lynch reports that Bil Keane passed away recently. The early years of his most sucescful creation, The Family Circle, have been reprinted by IDW and although I bought and liked both boks, I am a bigger fan of his 'other' strip, Channel Chuckles. Like Family Circle it was a daily cartoon series with a larger selection of gags on the Sunday. Keane kept this going for almost 20 years, most of which he did it alongside Family Circle, which started only a couple of years after it. I have updated the concept for a cartoon sries of my own with cartoonist Willem Ritstier for a couple of years. We did one cartoon every two weeks until recently and it made me appreciate the difficulty of doing not one but two series a week, needing a minumum of 12 gagas each every week. Family Circle may have been a bit saccharine, but Chanel Chuckles had a bit more bite. The satirical nature of the basic premiss, a cartoon series about television and all that it brings along, allowed for a bit more sarcasm. It is never mentioned by seller when they advertise their Sunday papers, but I am always glad to find it. It often brings a smile on my face. Not a small achievement.
4 comments:
It saddens me that there can now never be a Bil-Keane guest-strip of Calvin and Hobbes.
hi
Thanks for these, Ger. It's interesting that when Bil was nominated for an NCS Division Award, it was for both FC and CC!
And thanks for posting so many of these strips. I am seeing all of these for the first time!
Perhaps you could post examples of Keane's third strip, "Sideshow". I used to have a book called "Jest in Pun" which collected several Sideshows.
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