Laughing Out Not So Loud

Thursday Extra Day. 

 

 Bil Keane will always be best known for his saccharine family series The Family Circus. Especially the many Snday he did with the kid who blames a ghost, or the stippled line that show how one of the other kids took the long route from a to b. My personal favorite has always been his Channel Chuckles gag panel (daily and Sunday) that ran from long before The Circus was born until deep into it's run. But when exactly did it start? Today I went back and had a look. It seems Channel Chuckles was an immediate hit, probably due to the fact that it's onr column format was especiall made for use on the otherwise dull tv listing page. I narrowed my search to California papers and found six who started it from the beginning, february 15, 1954. The first three weeks are numbered, altough not every paper used them in the same order.

 

When In Doubt

Saturday Leftover Day. 

When in doubt, go for the easy laugh. Bil Keane certainly did so (and very succesfully, too) with his long running daily gag series Channel Chuckles. They are not all hysterical, but the number of hits is tremendous for an output like this. I hope one dau someone will read them all and produce a 240 page collection of the best of them. I'll do the hard work and select them for you.

 

Hop To It

Saturday Leftover Day.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared some weeks of daily strips from the early fifties western strip Hopalong Cassidy by Dan Spiegle. Coincidentally I was going through my set of Phladelphia Bulletin Fun Books and found that they had pages of dailies of this strip as well. Except that they were a couple of years ealrier and in color. So I pulled them up from my raw scan files, added some more Sundays I had not done yet and cleaned the whole thing up.

The Fun Books are up at eBay for a rediculously low price and I recemmoned them for all sorts of collectors. They were an extra 8 page Sunday section for the kids, which was edited by later Family Circle's Bill Keane. He also did Channel Chuckles, which I have shown here a lot. In the forties he worked on the Philadelphia Bulletin, producing thos section, which apart from the occasional cover, also contained his first strip Silly Philly and the punfilled Myrth Quackers. There are several features in Fun Book, from which I particulary like Play Detective and Pic Trix. Pic Trix was a sort of inverted version of Al Jaffee's later fold-in, where you had to fold in parts of the panel to create new images. I was done by Morrie Brickman, who later gained fame with The Small Society. He is not related to Annie Hall co-writer Marshall Brickman, but his son Paul Brickman did write and direct Risky Business.

Serious comic strip fans will like these section for the large tabloid pages of Mandrake and later Hopalong Cassidy. If you are really lucky, you will find one with The Spirit, since it was used as a foldarund for Will Eisner's weekly stories. For some of the Fun Books on my blog you can also follow the link.

The Funny Tube

Sunday Stockpile Day.

I am guessing we can all use a chuckle these days.

Cheesy Philly Mirth

I find almost anything Bil Keane did before The Family Circle funnier.