Note: This entry contains some language and inappropriate themes; viewer discretion recommended.
About
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Dysfunctional Family Circus is a series of exploitable macros based on the syndicated comic strip The Family Circus, a long-running daily cartoon centered around the everyday life of an All-American Christian family. While parodies of the original comic were self-published as early as in the late 1980s, they gained much of its online popularity in the mid 1990s through fan-created single topic blogs.
Origin
The Family Circus
Created and written by American cartoonist Bil Keane, The Family Circus debuted On February 28th, 1960 and has been in continuous production and publication ever since. Having appeared in 1,500 newspapers over the past four decades, it is considered one of the most widely syndicated cartoon panel in the world. For more examples of the original strips, check out the official website.
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Early Parodies
Anonymous artists and fans of Family Circus have been making parodies of the original comic since as early as in 1989. These parodies consisted of imitative illustrations and altered captions, ofen discussing adult-only topics and serious vices like adultery, drug abuse, animal cruelty and cannibalism.
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Dysfunctional Family Circus (DFC)
Brian Boling has been cited by Stay Free! magazine as one of the earliest known editors of DFC comic zines, who published his compilation of artworks as a booklet titled “Dysfunctional Family Circus” in 1992:
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Brian Boling et al.
“Dysfunctional Family Circus”
Cut-and-paste zine, circa 1992For 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.
Spread
According to unconfirmed details on AllExperts page, acquiring a copy of the parody zines was a rather difficult task in the age of snail mail. The booklets were allegedly distributed through anonymous networks of chain mails, nightclubs or coffee houses in America/Europe, while the few internet-savvy folks managed to obtain their copies by making requests via facsimiles and Usenet.
This parody phenomenon eventually found its way to the Internet through a number of incarnations in the 1990s. The first wave of iterations emerged across the web circa 1994, but the most recognized instances of Dysfunctional Family Circus strips were hosted on SpinnWebe, a gallery site created by Greg Galcik in 1995. In similar vein to Single Topic Blogs, SpinnWebe offered an automatic caption generator for the visitors to submit their own iterations, the best of which were selected by Galick and a number of editors for front-page publication.
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Thematically, the tones of the captions were similar to the original parodies but users also added jokes about breaking the fourth wall, in the process criticizing the artistic work of Bil Keane.
Copyright Infringement
In September 1999, Galcik received a cease-and-desist notice from King Features Syndicate, the publishers of The Family Circus, on account of copyright violations. Fans of the website did not receive the news well and many viewers followed up with bold statements in protest.
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However, following a phone conversation between Galcik and the then 77-year-old Keane, Galcik voluntarily decided to take down the website following the publication of 500th strip in November 1999. Galcik stated that the reasoning for this decision was out of respect for Keane after personally hearing his displeasure over some of the posted captions.
Derivatives
On September 27th 2006, Losanjealous created The Nietzsche Family Circus, a comic generator application that randomly pairs up Keane’s illustrations with aphorisms written by the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, most renowned for his critical evaluation of Christian values:
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On December 19th, 2007, another site Driven by Boredom began hosting Dysfunctional Family Circus images.
Archives & Resources
Some active archives and further examples can be found here: