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Bil Keane - 'Family Circus' Comic Creator - Dead at 89

Bil Keane was creator of "The Family Circus," the gentle, long-running comic syndicated in almost 1,500 newspapers. Mr. Keane died Tuesday at age 89 at his home in Arizona. He had become a wry poet of the innocence of childhood with his single-panel cartoon portraying the joys and travails of growing up. Except that his characters, based on his own family, never aged at all.

The themes stayed constant for the more than half-century Mr. Keane wrote and drew the comic: The children play with their pets, track snow into the house, have tantrums, kneel for their prayers, and tire out their long-suffering, ever-affectionate mother, "Mommy." The cartoons were more sharply observed than ha-ha funny. "I would rather have the readers react with a warm smile, a tug at the heart or a lump in the throat as they recall doing the same things in their own families," Mr. Keane once said.

A native of Philadelphia, Mr. Keane taught himself cartooning by copying New Yorker artists like Peter Arno and George Price. During World War II, he served in the Army, drawing a strip called "At Ease With the Japanese" for Stars and Stripes. In 1945 Mr. Keane became a staff artist for the Philadelphia Bulletin. In 1954, he launched his first syndicated comic, "Channel Chuckles," which highlighted the lighter side of the emerging medium of television.

He founded "The Family Circus" in 1960, and it caught on quickly. Mr. Keane modeled the mother on his wife Thelma, whom he met in Australia during the war. "When the cartoon first appeared, she looked so much like 'Mommy' that if she was in the supermarket, people would come up to her and say, 'Aren't you the Mommy in 'Family Circus?' Mr. Keane had friendships with several other cartoonists, including Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, and was close to newspaper columnist Erma Bombeck, illustrating one of her books.

Because so many found "The Family Circus" guileless the strip was a frequent target of satires, many of which Mr. Keane professed to like. But in 1999, Mr. Keane insisted that the website "Dysfunctional Family Circus," which contained astringent captions to his drawings, be taken down. Fellow cartoonists also occasionally paid tribute to the comic, and as a stunt Mr. Keane and Scott Adams, creator and author of "Dilbert," briefly swapped roles. "Bil gave me the best career advice of my life," said Mr. Adams. "When Dilbert was in only a few dozen newspapers, he told me to stop making comics that appeal to cartoonists and start writing for the audience."

He was helped in recent years by his son, Jeff, who handled the final inking duties and plans to continue the comic, according to King Features Syndicate. When they were growing up, the Keane kids "thought our dad really enjoyed being around us," Jeff Keane said. "Later we realized he was getting ideas from us all the time."

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