Almost everything on the Monday, Feb. 29, 1960 front page of the Des Moines Register made for grim reading: Southern senators plotting to kill a civil rights bill. An armed robbery on School Street. Iowans weary of winter cold. But sandwiched between stories about a brewing Middle East border war and President Eisenhower’s state visit to a sweltering Argentina was something cheerier: the world premiere of Bil Keane’s now-ubiquitous The Family Circus.
The one-panel comic appeared under its original name, The Family Circle.
According to an accompanying front-page story, that’s “because it goes round and round in a swirl of hilarity that nudges funny-bones of families everywhere.” The title went from Circle to Circus pretty quickly after a long-established magazine named Family Circle complained. But nothing else about the comic changed. That’s fitting because very little has changed in The Family Circus since the early ’60s.
“We are, in the comics, the last frontier of good, wholesome family humor and entertainment,” Bil Keane told the AP in 1995. “On radio and television, magazines and the movies, you can’t tell what you’re going to get.”
With The Family Circus you always know what you’re going to get: lukewarm humor about characters sort of based on Keane’s family, circa 1959, living in a sort of Scottsdale, Arizona, where the Keane family moved in 1959. That frontpage panel in 1960 is so blandly familiar it’s not worth describing. It could have run at any point in the strip’s history. And increasingly, there’s a good chance it might also run at some point in its future.
That’s because Family Circus is made increasingly of recycled material, as Don McHoull explains in a fascinating YouTube video he posted in June, “The weird zombie existence of the Family Circus.”
Reworking old material has always been common in comics. Two prominent strips, Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, run these days as reprints, because Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson were (rightly) considered irreplaceable and no one took over the features once they stopped drawing. But according to McHoull, what’s happened with The Family Circus since Jeff Keane took over after his father’s death in 2011 doesn’t resemble what other strips have done over the years. And neither Keane nor the papers that carry The Family Circus have acknowledged the recycling program.
If it was just recycling old jokes or reprinting old strips, that wouldn’t be interesting, McHoll said: “What intrigues me is the lengths it will go to disguise decades-old panels as new material.”
The two most common changes in the recycled strips are the mother’s hair and the shape of TVs.
Today’s Family Circus is exactly the same as the one that ran 28 years ago except for the TV and the mom’s hairstyle
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After 36 years in print, Bil Keane changed the mother’s hairstyle in 1997 — a move so surprising, given the relentless sameness of the strip, it was covered as a news story by major papers like the Los Angeles Times. The recycled strips currently running will reprint a panel exactly as it appeared decades ago, but update the mother’s hair so it’s not obviously from before 1997.
Likewise, strips from decades ago will run with just changes to the family’s TV, altering it from a big ’60s console to a contemporary flatscreen. And for a brief time during the height of the COVID pandemic, there was another change: Old strips were rerun, but masks were placed on characters’ faces when they were out in public. Everything else remained the same unless the mother’s hair or a TV was in the frame.
According to McHoull, the amount of lightly altered recycled material dates back to at least 2016. It increased noticeably in 2020, and has only grown since.
“Somehow one of the most popular comic strips of all time has mostly stopped creating new material without anyone really noticing,” he said.
It doesn’t seem to have affected the popularity of The Family Circus. According to King Features Syndicate, which has distributed the strip since 1986, it is the most popular one-panel comic in the world. Before 1986, it was syndicated by the Register and Tribune Syndicate. That’s why The Family Circle got the front-page treatment in the Register in February 1960.
The Des Moines Register has been published under that name since 1915, 12 years after it was purchased by Garner Cowles, Sr., a prominent banker turned publisher. It remained a Cowles family business until they sold to Gannett in 1985. The Register and Tribune Syndicate was sold off to King Feature the following year.
The syndicate was started in 1922 by John Cowles, Sr., son of Garner Sr. It syndicated feature stories, columns and comics to newspapers and magazines around the country, and was already syndicating an earlier one-panel comic by Bil Keane, Channel Chuckles (the “chuckles” were about people watching TV) when he came up with The Family Circle. After the name changed, The Family Circus went on to become the most successful comic distributed by the Register and Tribune.
This article is from Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
