Bil Keane's daily single-frame comic strip began chronicling the mild misadventures of a white, middle-class suburban family on February 19, 1960 and is currently distributed to over 1,300 newspapers, making it the most popular panel in the world. Comics historian Ron Goulart has called The Family Circus "one of the gentlest and most heartwarming panels in comics history," and it is precisely this wryly humorous perspective which has made Keane's creation one of the clearest, most significant examples of the deep-seated American belief in the nuclear family as the moral center of domestic life. If a "circus" can be accurately described as a form of entertainment which displays human beings in control of both wild beasts and their own fears, then the ring which surrounds each panel of Bil Keane's strip is apt indeed, for The Family Circus takes everything that might be threatening or frightening about...