I think one reason is that it takes up space that could be used for a better strip. You know there are better strips out there that your paper doesn’t carry, and it’s frustrating.
Also, people like to bitch.
lKeane had a close friendship with humorist, newspaper columnist and fellow Catholic Erma Bombeck until her death in 1996. Keane provided illustrations for Bombeck’s book Just Wait Until You Have Children of Your Own!. In Bombeck’s posthumous book Forever Erma, he provided a tribute on the last page–Billy with a tear coming out of one eye. No caption was necessary.
I came in here to say this. You wrote it far better than I could.
The situations aren’t really analogous. Family Circus didn’t offend people in itself, but it somehow ended up being the symbolic ‘Long runner using the same jokes’ strip, much like Garfield is the standard ‘Merchandise-driven blandness’ strip and Beetle Bailey is the symbolic ‘So unfunny you wonder about the potential salvation of mankind’ strip. No one found Family Circus itself offensive, it just became (not fairly, but what can you do) the face for a comics page that is 95% unfunny comics from 40 years ago, using the same jokes over and over. Mostly about Golf.
What people were really complaining about is it’s almost impossible for new comics to get started. The next Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, and Bloom County are likely going to be web comics, which means there’s a very good chance that the creator won’t be able to do them full time. Which means there will be many, many fewer of them.
None of that is/was Bil Kane’s fault, of course. There’s nothing wrong with his style of cute comics, and as Pastis mentioned, he did have genuinely funny strips from time to time.
A better analogy would be complaining about American Idol as a symbol of reality shows, by viewers who like scripted shows. (For this to work, you have to imagine that there are only 4 channels, and the only non-reality shows on TV, ever, was 3 and a Half Men, The Simpsons, and one episode of Futurama every month.) So you can’t just ‘watch something else’ because the stuff you don’t like has locked out the stuff you do. That wouldn’t be American Idol’s fault, either, it’s just the party face for Team Evil. (Well, not evil, exactly. Team Tasteless and Boring. The early episodes that focus on humiliating people who can’t sing are evil, though)
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Of course, Funky Winkerbean did ‘grow up’ and change it’s humor style as it went on, and people hate it for that. You can’t win . . . (especially if you live in the Funky Winkerbean universe)
Were these people actively lobbying to have Family Circus banned? Because otherwise, I don’t think your comparison holds.
This sums it up.