From: dxf12@po.CWRU.Edu (Douglas Fowler)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.strips
Subject: Re: Happy Birthday Bil!
Date: 6 Oct 1992 21:28:09 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Reply-To: dxf12@po.CWRU.Edu (Douglas Fowler)
NNTP-Posting-Host: slc12.ins.cwru.edu


In a previous article, bn823@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Peter Mullaney) says:

>
>In a previous article, dx@netcom.com (dx) says:
>
>>Today (10/5/92) is the 70th birthday of the undisputed Dean of American
>>Comic Art, Bil Keane.  Happy birthday Bil!
>>
>>-dx
>>
>
>HOW COME DEPARTMENT (<- stolen from Halto's History??????)
>
>A few years back there was a strip that supposedly parodied the Keane family
>life.  Billy (his real son) got married.  The Sunday strip showed Billy and
>a Girl simultaneously thinking (as kids) who they were going to marry.  I 
>think it also stated that the real Billy was actually tieing the knot.
>Now to my point - Is Mr. Keane really 70 (or was the original post a joke)?
>Did Mr. Keane wait until his 40's to have kids?   Did Billy get married in his 
>30's or 40's (I didn't get this impression from the aforementioned strip)?
>As an aside - Why does Mr. Keane still show strips drawn by 5 year old Billy?
>
>
>Oh yeah - I read the strip.  It's way better than things like Andy Capp and
>it makes more sense than "The Far Side".  (Every month or so I do get a 
>laugh out of "The Far Side".)

     It was Jeffy who was getting married.  Jeff is his youngest son, and
the only one named after a FC kid. (Of course, that could be in reverse -
he could have been born AFTER it started in 1960.)  According to Mr. Keane's
response to one of the compilations of misc.kids stuff I sent him, in which I
asked what happens if he retires, he said Jeff is now his assistant,
and handles special stuff as well as coloring the Sunday strips.
(Now you guys will be joking about Cartoonist Jeffy, huh?  Billy is 7 in
the strips, and Cartoonist Billy may be a parody on the way Bil drew when
young.)
     He has 5 kids (4 boys and 1 girl, but I assume he felt 5 kids would
be too confusing for his strip, plus that would tie in with Jeff being
born later than the strip, but the others before.)  He has 6 grandkids,
and the backs of his compilations started mentioning that his grandkids
now provided inspirations for him starting around 1980-'81.  This would
place his oldest kids as being born anywhere from 1950-1955.  He started
FC after the family moved to Arizona, and the back cover of one compilation
mentions that he, his wife, and his kids moved out there, so he had to have
at least 2, and could have had all 5 before 1960.  Therefore, Jeff
was probably getting married at age 25 or 30.
     My guess is that he started the strip with the kids about the ages
you see in the strip - 7, 5.5, 3.5, and 1 - and in boy-girl-boy-boy order.
He had to have gotten some ideas from previous years to start the strip,
so he started using them, but didn't use any of his kids' real names, perhaps
for privacy reasons.  They may have decided that if they had another child,
they would use either Jeff or Dolly, so that's where those names came from.
Billy was like Bil was growing up at first, but later anything his kids did
at a certain age could be attributed to him.  I don't know where the name
PJ came from - perhaps that stands for the first names of his parents or
something.  This paragraph is mere conjecture, unlike the top 2.
-- 
Doug Fowler: dxf12@po.CWRU.edu      :    "Every baby born into the world is
Real home: Canton, Ohio             :  finer than the last."--Charles Dickens
 Trying to follow in the path of our :     "A baby is an inestimable
Lord;anything close will be a success:  blessing and bother."--Mark Twain