When I was a kid, my three favorite comics were Peanuts, For Better or For Worse, and The Family Circus. Peanuts is still regarded, as it’s been since the 60s, as not just a great comic but great American art. FBOFW, in the wake of cartoonist Lynn Johnston’s retirement, has strangely disappeared from the pop-culture landscape—have you ever seen a FBOFW character on Tumblr? The Family Circus, on the other hand, has become established as the epitome of squareness—its trademark circular frame notwithstanding—and endlessly satirized. (To see what I mean, try a Google Image search for “Family Circus.” The results will be NSFW.)

People do not understand why I have always loved, and continue to love, The Family Circus—whose creator, Bil Keane, died this week at the age of 89. The humor seems safe at best, stale at worst. Whereas Charles Schulz went through a series of stages during which Peanuts explored different themes and styles, and Johnston had the FBOFW characters age in real time, The Family Circus always stayed exactly the same. Keane took a couple of years to polish his style, and then the characters and situations were set in stone, pristinely and uniformly inked by first Keane himself and then, in latter years, by his son Jeff (“Jeffy”). Each comic—even most of the Sunday editions—consisted of only one panel, severely limiting Keane’s dramatic range. Why even bother reading the comic, unless you were a bored parent waiting for your kid to fall asleep?

Here’s why.

The distinctive style. One reason The Family Circus is so meme-able is that Keane’s style was distinctive, consistent, and instantly recognizable. Those little fireplug kids, that round frame around each comic, those meticulously drawn paths that I loved to follow with my finger—don’t lie and say you didn’t do the same.

The creativity. Coming up with a fresh, funny, but inoffensive scenario about family life every single day for decades is not an assignment most people would want to give themselves—could you do it? Just try, and then let’s line up your efforts, day for day, next to Bil Keane’s.

The subtlety. People think The Family Circus is boring because the characters seem to have such a limited expressive range. That’s true, but by staying within that dry little range, Keane avoided the distastefully overblown quality of so many strips about kids and parents. Maybe if the kids in my family had done more troublemaking and screaming at each other I would have preferred something like Dennis the Menace or The Katzenjammer Kids, but I could relate to a universe where you felt bad if you ever gave your mom cause to furrow her brow. (Also, the chubby Gabler kids were kind of shaped like the waistless little Family Circus brood.)

The absurdity. The Family Circus is not about artificial gags—it’s about observations. And what are those observations about? They’re about the absurdity of family life. Kids misunderstand their parents’ intentions, they mispronounce words, they wear clothes the wrong way, they have bizarre interests and priorities. One of the most consistent Family Circus scenarios has a parent looking on in affectionate disbelief as a child says something silly, with the greatest sincerity. Kids are weird, and Bil Keane got that.

The heart. Say that there were about 1,000 too many panels about transparent angelic grandparents looking on or intervening from the next world, and I won’t disagree with you—I’ve always found those panels kind of creepy. But Keane’s characters love each other unconditionally, and while you’ll never win a Pulitzer for creating that kind of world, you can certainly win a Reuben—and millions of devoted fans. What the fuck is wrong with that?

– Jay Gabler