Bil spanks Thel from the comic strip Family Circus. Conception by Bawdy Bard with art by Kevin Karstens. Characters © King Features Syndicate. Posted by the Web-Ed on 04/23/2021.
Family Circus has been around a long time - since 1960, in fact, when Bil Keane created it. (The reason he spelled his name "Bil" is not known to us, but he did the same thing with the strip's parents Bil and Thel who are clearly modeled after himself and his wife Thelma). His son Jeff Keane is doing the strip today, and it is believed to be the most widely syndicated strip in the world, appearing in over 1500 newspapers. It's fitting that it has stayed in the family, because it is a perfect representative of the family-based comic strip.
Bawdy Bard selected the only logical M/F pairing for this spanking cartoon, namely Bil and Thel. They're both enthusiastic about the spanking but somewhat less than discreet as they left the drapes on their bedroom window open. Kevin Karstens rendered the characters well, getting the gag across (the kids misunderstanding what they're seeing because they can only comprehend spanking as punishment) with ease. Karstens abandoned his usual irregularly-shaped polygonal panels in favor of Family Circus's signature circle-shaped panel, but we believe he would have colored his art as usual and think that once again an unknown third party removed the color for reasons of his own. (See Foxtrot Red Hot #1 for more information.) That still doesn't explain the absence of Thel's right leg, or who added the URL "go.to.tt2000" and we won't speculate on either point. No other version of this cartoon, either colored or black & white, is known to exist at the present time for comparison purposes.
