Ger Apeldoorn has posted a considerable collection of Bil Keane’s other feature Channel Chuckles that ran from 1954 through 1976 (Family Circus launched in 1960).
Here’s Ger explaining Channel Chuckles:
Like Family Circle it was a daily cartoon series with a larger selection of gags on the Sunday. Keane kept this going for almost 20 years, most of which he did it alongside Family Circle, which started only a couple of years after it. I have updated the concept for a cartoon sries of my own with cartoonist Willem Ritstier for a couple of years. We did one cartoon every two weeks until recently and it made me appreciate the difficulty of doing not one but two series a week, needing a minumum of 12 gagas each every week. Family Circle may have been a bit saccharine, but Chanel Chuckles had a bit more bite. The satirical nature of the basic premiss, a cartoon series about television and all that it brings along, allowed for a bit more sarcasm.
Visit his site to enjoy the strips.
Via Tom Spurgeon
Never really keen (no pun intended) on The Family Circus. Channel Chuckles, on the other, could be biting. I only wondered what would have happened if Channel Chuckles had covered sitcoms such as Seinfeld/Friends, soaps such as Dynasty, the explosion of cable/satellite TV channels or the recent wave of reality TV shows–not to mention such applications as video games, Youtube(R), karaoke and DVDs.