From The Comics Journal message board… The topic is basically, why aren’t characters in super-hero comic books shown smoking anymore?

Posting: The reason why there is no smoking
in marvel is because [Marvel comics editor in cheif, Joe] Quesada has banned it. Not even Wolverine or the Punisher can smoke anymore. Quesada believes that children look up to Marvel superheros, and that by having smoking in thier comics kids will
want to smoke…

Quesada is on a high horse about this because his father died of lung cancer.

Response: Too bad his father didn’t die from making shitty comics.

And, kickin’ it all the way back to the 90s, is the now-legendary Disfunctional Family Circus:

Here’s the story on this one, taken from illegal-art.org:

Brian Boling et al.
“Dysfunctional Family Circus”

Cut-and-paste zine, circa 1992



For Christmas one year, Boling doctored 100 of Bill Keane’s Family Circus
panels, compiled them into a zine–“Dysfunctional Family Circus”–and
gave copies to high school friends. Little did he know that he had
tapped
into the zeitgeist. A zine with the same title had made its debut a
decade earlier. And in the mid-1990s, a man began posting Bill Keane
panels online and asking web users to submit their own captions. After
five years of operating worry-free, the site received a
cease-and-desist order from Family Circus‘s
publisher, King Comics Syndicate. (The editor considered fighting, but
after having a heart-to-heart with Keane himself, he decided to close
the site.)

To this day, you can still find examples of Family Circus parodies all over the web.

I’m on a roll here, people…

And of course there’s that classic Pearls Before Swine story arc in which Osama Bin Laden hides out with the Family Circus characters, the joke being that the characters are so out of touch that they don’t know who he is.

(Click for larger image)

I guess if I’m going to post Family Circus parodies, I’ve got to include these recent classics:

The Cthulhu Circus [Updated] :: Accordion Guy