Rating: 
Summary: Introspective
Review: "Act like you had a pair!" barks Daddy at Billy. What happened to normally pleasant Daddy? We soon find out. Caught having sex in a public washroom, Daddy is forced, in a series of incredibly vivid flashbacks, to re-examine his values. Was it a good idea for him and Thel to teach Dolly, Billy, and Jeffy to download porn? What about the wife swapping? The night encounters in parks behind bushes? The planned pyramid scheme? A work of great depravity and delight, this is the fifth book in Keane's Gay-and-Lesbian Porn series.
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Summary: Say This.
Review: Acid laced and mushroom magic come to mind when I read this latest novel. A storm of debates have raged over the impact of teaching this novel to the nation's fifth graders. This is one of the books that Laura Bush has recomended in her anti- literacy campaign. A new and twisted pot of stories and poems from the lives of the children has emerged. Billy has once again started on his use of drugs. I hate to say to the usual reader of the FC that he has had to sell his body to purchase his cheap high. He has also started to get Jeffy involved in drug use. Dolly has ran of to Tailand and PJ has become infested with rabies. This could be a good read if not for the fact that Keane does not have the sense to preach a moral lesson here. He just sees this as an fun read. I feel sorry for the youth who have to read this
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Summary: Love those ghosts!
Review: Another addition in a long list of family-centered literary and visual masterpieces, this book reveals, at long last, Billy's true desires. In a long, drawn out mushroom induced dream sequence, we first see Billy on the streets of Mogadishu, strung out on khat, looking for a way to get out of Somalia and start his life over again in America. Eventually, Billy wins a visa and is on his way! But after only a few weeks on the streets of NYC, we see Billy living in a cardboard crate, hooking up with a woman who looks a little too much like Dolly. It's too much for him, and he eventually heads down to the Salvation Army mission, where he gets his act together, and is drawn to the ministry. We see page after page of Billy preaching the good word on the street corners of NYC. Eventually, Billy falls in love with another soldier in the army of the Lord, and they begin to make plans for the future, until Billy is brutally murdered one night at the hands of some roughs. His new found love is grief stricken, and wishes night after night that she could tell him how she truly felt. Eventually, Billy returns to her in the form of the ghost "Ida Know" and she makes love to her while she is making some pots for the mission on her pottery wheel. Truly, one of the most romantically drawn strips I have ever seen.
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Summary: Endless Opportunities for Discovery
Review: Bil Keane's urgency in What Does This Say? may have much to do with the age of his children. He brackets his combative, inspiring manual with the news that the surviving members of his Family Circus brood are now in their seventies and eighties and none have time for the mediocre. (One doubts that they ever did.) Nor will he countenance such fashionable notions as the death of the author or abide "the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism" let alone "ideological cheerleading." Keane illuminates both the how and why of his title and points us in all the right directions: toward the Romantics because they "startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life"; toward Austen, James, Proust; toward Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy; toward Cervantes and Shakespeare (but of course!), Ibsen and Oscar Wilde.
What Does This Say? In order to know, Keane advises us to reread, reread, reread, and do so aloud as often as possible. "As a boy of eight," he tells us, "I would walk about chanting Housman's and William Blake's lyrics to myself, and I still do, less frequently yet with undiminished fervor." And why should we engage in this apparently solitary activity? To increase our wit and imagination, our sense of intimacy--in short, our entire consciousness--and also to heal our pain. "Until you become yourself," Keane avers, "what benefit can you be to others." So much for reading as an escape from the self!
Still, many of this volume's pleasures may indeed be selfish. The author is at his best when he is thinking aloud and anew, and his material offers him--and therefore us--endless opportunities for discovery. Keane cherishes one-panel comics because they are "a prophetic mode" and the entire Sunday section of comics for its wisdom. Intriguingly, he fears more for the fate of the latter: "The Sunday comics section requires more readers than a one-panel comic does, a statement so odd that it puzzles me, even as I agree with it." We must, he adjures, crusade against its possible extinction and read the Sunday comics "in the coming years of the third millennium, as they were read in the eighteenth and nineteenth century: for aesthetic pleasure and for spiritual insight."
Keane is never heavy, since his vision-quest contains a healthy love of irony--Jedediah Purdy, take note: "Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise." Keane knows full well that a prophet should stop at nothing to get his belief and love across, and throughout What Does This Say? he is as unstinting as the visionary company of the family circus he so adores.
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Summary: Very, very funny book
Review: I absolutely love this book! It is so, so funny. I have loved the Family Circus all my life. This book is filled with funny moments as well as some touching moments involving everyone. I have developed quite a collection of Bill Keane's "Family Circus" books, and this is another wonderful, funny book to read and laugh out loud about for years to come.
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Summary: Happiness
Review: i love bil keanes family circus series. i wish there would be more to come. i am looking to collect all of the books he has ever made but they are extremely hard to find! i would buy all. they are a funny yet family oriented cartoon series that makes you feel all fuzzy inside reading them. i absolutely love the family circus!!!!!!!!
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Summary: Comic strips at their finest! Huzzah for Keane!
Review: If there is a finer piece of work every written in the history of comics, I have yet to see it! Once again Bil Keane has published an anthology just as sure to raise the bar for his peers in the comic industry as it is to delight his legions of fans. Though he utilizes only a single, circular panel in his art, time and time again Keane has proven that in no way does this format limit his genius of comic delievery. He consistantly produces panels of a dazzling scope and depth, which hide layers upon layers of humor that seem to demand multiple readings. Although enourmously complex and even at times displaying a dark sense of humor, Keane nevertheless is able to keep even the youngest of readers amused through his delightful art and the uplifting messages his panels hide. Sad to say, but since the death of Charles Shultz, Bil Keane has been left without a true peer in the world of comics. ...No, truly each period of human exsistence has produced a select few men whom society can look up to. Just as the Roman Historian Sallust could proudly say he lived in the Republic of Caesar and Cato, and past generations could say they lived in the days of Washington and Jefferson, so can we say we knew the time of Keane and Roy, and thus are we more fortunate than all others who came before.
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Summary: An Excellent Primer for the Revolution
Review: Is this satire, or has Keane really laid the groundwork for Karl Rove's strategy for taking the White House and foisting an unwanted war in the Middle East upon an unsuspecting West?I for one, think that Keane's genius has always been as stealth propagandist, with "Ida Know" and "Not Me" the Republican Dirty Tricksters we've all grown to know and love. Billy, of course, plays the unsuspecting bourgeois here, with PJ as the lumpenproletarian. Still, it amazes me to think that within the constraints of the comic book form that Keane has exercised his mastery, he could present a critique on "People's War," the assassination of Sergei Kirov, and explain why Sendero Luminosa failed miserably in Peru! This is an important work, a well needed corrective to the ponderous grayness and forced optimism of Hardt and Negri's Empire. We can only hope that this book finds a much wider audience than one might expect from the usual group of folks debating the latest recipes in Workers World News.
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Summary: Curious
Review: Keane's stab at serial mystery fiction, his Inspector Siggurdson is a special detective for the Detroit Police Department with a secret: He doesn't know how to read.
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Summary: Literary Equivalent of Early Elvis!!
Review: Keane, much like fellow southerner Elvis Presley, interprets his literary and illustrator predecessors in a way that re-energizes and revolutionizes the comic panel form. Whereas Presley combined the reved-up blues of Arthur Crudup with the solemn harmonies of the Jordanaires into two minute-50 second explosions of sound that challenged the staid conformity of the Eisenhower years, Keane likewise blends the relationship dramas of a Tennessee Williams with the drawn simplicity of Mark Trail's Dodd and Elrod to create poignant one-panel drawings of post modern takes on family relationships and late 20th Century suburban life. While Presley was changing the way we relate to and experience popular music, Keane was forever altering the daily comic strip. As Elvis Presley's "Sun Sessions" graces your CD case, Keane's "What Does This Say" deserves an honored location on your book case.
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