The One that Started it All?

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.