Bruce Blitz Big Book of Cartooning is terrific! The methods used are simple, easy to follow and entertaining. His ideas and experience are a must for people in the cartooning business. I am using his book as a number one reference for my cartoons.
It is a must buy book if you want to succeed in cartooning.

Simple to understand, but heavy with content. Suited for tweens to teens who have a desire to learn cartooning.

Along with many of his other books Bruce Blitz makes it easy to understand the ideas behind cartooning. I plan on buying any of his other books I can find.

close the covers and say to yourself, "This author really knows what he's talking about!" This is just such a book.

Whether you're from Australia, Norway, or the U.S.A., you'll find some touchstone in this book. Keane is currently mining the mirth lodes of his grandchildren, but this earlier work of his is panned from the rich gold-bearing stream of his own childrens' shennanigans. And there's no dross in this slim volume, it's all highly-polished, 24-carat classic shiny fun!

I highly recommend "Any Children?" to anyone who has children, or had them, or wants them. It gives a positive feel for the joys of children. Go ahead me lads, give it a read!

This book has some of the oldest and a lot of hilarious cartoons from the family circus. It's very large and is perfect for any fan.

With the soon-to-be infamous phrase, "Grandma Was Here", Bil Keane ushers a new era of darkness into contemporary philosophical discourse. Clearly, the title references Jacques Derrida's idea of trace. Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, and P.J. can only acknowledge the conspicuous absence of Grandma by first declaring she once was "here" Upon further in(tro)spection, it becomes apparent that Keane's mission is much more ominous than simply referencing (and therefore lending further credence to) such an influential philosopher as Derrida. In fact, "Grandma" is aiming to undermine all of postmodern theory! While it appears that Keane's simple statement "grandma was here" takes for granted cause and effect, in fact Keane's "children" have begun to understand THEMSELVES as under erasure. This "trace" which Grandma left must be a result of her having once been embodied. As everyone knows it's GRANDPA who is in heaven, this mysterious disappearence of Grandma can only lead to one thing. Billy and Dolly must understand their own existence as fitting in historically with humanity. The simple use of the past tense in the titular phrase indicates Keane's understanding that Grandma once "was here". This undermines what is commonly thought of as a necessary absence of historicity (although perhaps it has left its own trace?), one of the fundamental tenants of postmodern theory. In this post-postmodern era, one can only imagine the absence which fills the "here" of Keane's dark philosophical "Circus".

This is a tragic tale in which the beloved Granny is exposed to a radioactive meteorite which causes her shrink quite rapidly. The children think she is a doll, unfortunately, and stuff her into clothes and make her go to the mall in her Barbie (r) convertible, and to play WWF Wrestling. But tragedy occurs when they "accidently" drop her out the window. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wave Granny goodbye!

Bil Keane has scored again with this remarkable story of a family coming together to fave controversy. When "Dad" loses his job as a successful cartoonist, the family decides that the last one to arrive is the first one to leave. Lovable PJ is locked in a basement closet and left to starve. Surviving as long as he can on mice and insects, PJ finally succumbs to the sweet arms of lady death and joins his grandfather in heaven. PJ then plots his revenge from the great beyond and bathes in the blood of the family that betrayed him.

This book makes profound statements in the form of a question, when Jeffy and Barfy get hooked on Jeopardy and grandma gambles the family savings on one Final Jeopardy question.

They think they are sure to win once they see the Final Jeopardy category is "Dead Grandpas Look'n Down From Heaven," so they bet it all. During the commercial break, "Not Me", "Ida Know" and "Just B. Cause" whisper in Jeffy's left ear that the question is sure to be: "Who is Aaron Carter?"

Poor Jeffy! When the answer is: "He's really burning in heck! He's not up in heaven after all." Jeffy panics and doesn't write "Who is 'ol Grandpa" and goes with Aaron Carter. The Circus clan loses their home in a side wager that Grandma had placed in Las Vegas and they all end homeless.

A beautiful tale, with something for the whole family (dogs and all).

Bil Keane is undeniably a master of delving into the inner child in us all--his usual focus is on the simple joys of watching a flutterby or eating p'sghetti. But in "I had a Frightmare", he uncovers the darker side of childhood, when Jeffy suffers from a terrifying dream. We never learn the nature of it--Keane holds the suspense, keeping us on the edge of our seats--but it reminds us of the frailty of life, our darkest fears, our impending mortality.

If this were all there was to the story, it might seem only a superficial exploration of our quiet despair. But the ghostly spirits of "Ida Know" and "Not me" haunt the unsuspecting Keane family, driving the unsuspecting Keane parents to punish their innocent children. Even the familiar circular panels take on sinister overtones, and the cartoon drawings, with their partially incomplete lines and bizarre shading, take on Lovecraftian overtones. There is no respite until the book, mercifully, reaches its end.

As with his previous books, Keane has shown us deep insight. But this book, and the traumatic stories it contains, may prove too intense for the youngest readers. Be warned: you may have a frightmare of your own.

The Keane-ster dazzles us again with his light-hearted depictions of weekend life in an American family. My family and I get many laughs from this! Each cartoon is well drawn, and the puns are hilarious. Keane really creates a positive, happy feeling. It would be great if Keane brought back Not Me and Ida Know for the next book!

Bil Keane delivers to us a wonderfully created comic story, of the fabulously famous: Family Circus! He delights us with hilarious lines ("Read faster, Mommy, I can't stay awake much longer.") that remind us of when we were children.

The drawings are fairly well done, and it's one of those books you can just finish in one sitting. A funny line is: "This is my favorite pie, Mommy! What kind is it?"

It just goes to prove that we all have a little bit of kiddishness inside of us (Don't be silly, Dolly. They're freckles, not age spots."). It's a fun read, and if you don't like it, it certainly won't waste too much of your time if you're an avid reader, seeing as how it's only roughly around 50 pages (there are no page numbers).

So, enjoy! ("No, Grandma is ON Social Security, she's not a security guard.")

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.

What does it say? The true question of Bil Keane's legacy--his magnum opus, if you will--is far more profound than this question might lead one to conclude. Like Judy Blume's Margaret, Keane tears his very heart from his chest and screams out into the potentially empty universe: "Are you there, God? It's me, Bil." One might hope to learn the secrets of life for oneself, but the truth remains that only Keane possesses these treasures. By reading "What Does This Say?", you are one step closer to discovering your own humanity, as well as deciphering the cryptic missing l in Keane's moniker. Some say that he just can't spell,others that his mother ran out of space on the birth certificate. Me? I just think that in the language of the American family, "Bil" means "God".

The world eagerly awaited Keane's next book, and the world was not disappointed. The exquisite craftsmanship and attention to detail, not always (we must admit) his most distingushing characteristics, cannot at any point be faulted. It may well be that the obscenity-laced tantrum against manager Mike McCarthy, which led to Keane's being thrown off the Republic of Ireland's World Cup side, was just the tonic he needed to re-focus on his life's work, the saga of the Family Circus.

And what a saga it is, surpassing "Buddenbrooks", rivalling "War and Peace", leaving Dickens and Balzac bobbing in his wake. As the Millenium stumbles on towards a future too hideous to contemplate, Keane reminds us that family love, along with a bit of light-hearted dikplay, is just the tonic for jaded hearts.

In his modern classic "Daddy's Cap is on Backwards", Keane finally answers the question that has plagued his cartoon family for decades. At last we see his vision of what shall become of the post 50s nuclear family when at last it is proven that God has forsaken man to a cold and lonely eternity. And what a horrifying and terrible vision it truly is.

Now a few years past his heart-crushing Nietzscheian trip into the void of his soul, Billy returns to discover his family radically changed. Like broken marionettes, his parents walk about in a grey-faced fog, searching for meaning in their empty lives. In a poignant scene, Billy finds little PJ gazing into a 2am television screen, his eyes filled with tears, crying "please, please come back and talk to me, I'm no one when you're not here!"

But the vacuous ghosts of his progenitors and younger sibling are dwarfed by the rage of Billy's elder sister, Dolly. Filled with hate and loathing for a modern world without meaning and beyond her control, she has embraced a rabid, radical form of socio-religious fascism. With a terrifying cold fury and savage ruthlessness, Dolly's National Fourth Grade Christian Front rises to dominate the nameless suburban wasteland that Keane's cartoon family inhabit. As literature, teachers, neighbors and even Barky the dog are all cast into the bonfires in nightly Gestapo raids, their deaths blamed on the mythical villains "Not Me" and "Ida Know".

In a painful moment that lays bare her Electra complex in a scene of macabre and bitter truth, Dolly commands her father, now reduced to a hollow man, to throw her very mother into the arms of a rampaging angry mob. Over the sound of her dying screams, Dolly reassures her father that the murder of her mother shall free him from his destiny as a captive consumer and wage slave in a prison of his own making. Her lies convince neither of them, but they underline the reversal of their parent/child roles and make father Bill's tears all the more stark as the last remnant of his soul dies with his wife in the madness of the crowd.

Ultimately, alone in a world inhabited only by fear, shame, terror and the vacant-eyed armies of his sister, Billy is forced to choose between embracing Dolly's genocidal Armageddon-like vision and flinging himself into the flames of an all-too-common neighborhood bonfire. And as the flames and banners rise higher and higher, there are few that can disagree with his choice.

Yes Mr. Keane, Daddy's Cap is indeed on Backwards.

Although he will probably forever be denied the Nobel Prize
because of the radio broadcasts he made during the late war on
behalf of the government in Rome, Bil Keane is certainly one
writer who has nothing to prove. Having already taken his
place among the company of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and
Dostoyevsky, with the publication of "Daddy's Cap Is On
Backwards" Bil Keane now emerges as the master of them all.
The storyline is deceptively simple: after Thel dies in a freak
accident, Daddy abandons PJ, Jeffie, and Little Billy to take
Dolly on a meandering automobile tour across America,
culminating in the loss of Dolly, and the emergence -- too late
-- of Daddy's ability to love. But God, as Keane has long
demonstrated in his other works, is in the details, and in the
intricate and masterfully coordinated layer upon layer of
innuendo and hidden meanings. The title itself, on its face,
refers only to Dolly's innocent, even endearing, observation
that her father, unlike all the other men in her neighborhood,
lacks a prepuce. But the true significance of Daddy's "cap" is
slowly revealed, chapter by chapter, and even at the end of the
book one is left wondering whether other layers of meaning
remain, beyond the reader's grasp. The turning point of the
narrative is the episode where Jeffy sells his soul to
Mephistopheles for power and knowledge, yet this can be fully
understood only in contrast to the many events that precede and
follow it -- such as the haunting scene where little Billy
carries his father out of the burning city on his shoulders, or
the passage where PJ, now the viceroy of Egypt, reveals himself
to his brothers as the boy whom they sold into servitude years
before. Nothing can compare, however, to the episode where
Jeffy hurls his harpoon at the great white whale, it fails to
meet its mark, and is reclaimed by the Rhine-maidens as it
descends into the waters, while flames from the untended
hilltop fire engulf the island paradise, tossing a firebrand
onto the raft where little Billy and the runaway slave are

Bil Keane's brilliant spiritual memoir -- disguised as a deconstructionist parable of post-feminist suburbia -- perfectly depicts not only his own moral impasse, but also that of the American middle class during the mid-1990s. 'Daddy' -- desperately trying to cling to the archaic values of a bygone era, and totally unprepared for the unbridled optimism of the coming dot-com boom -- finds himself at odds not only with his family, but also with his society, and even himself. His steadfast refusal to conform to the social order, by wearing his cap back 'backwards', is a not-to-thinly-veiled representation of his increasing love for Evangelical Christianity in terms of marital infidelity. With his family and neighborhood embroiled in fear and chaos by the serial killing spree of the allegorical "Not Me" and "Ida Know", he discovers that that the only other person he can ultimately turn to for solace is his daughter. Dolly, the typical Keane heroine, is overeducated for her destiny, torn between motherhood and marriage on the one hand and, on the other, a longing to engage in the realm of ideas and the larger social order. By the end of fourth grade, following her mother's attempted suicide, Dolly chooses to convert to Orthodox Judaism. This initially devastates Daddy, but he eventually comes to realize that her religious nonconformity is of the same spiritual fabric as his social iconoclasm. It is not without accident that, in the end, all but one of the book's secular questions are answered: Keane is intentionally ambiguous as to whether or not Daddy chooses to starting wearing the cap 'forward'. Clearly, Keane's -- and American society's -- spiritual journey is far from over.