The Psychotic Family Circus goes dark! Burn in Hell, King Features Syndicate!

[BrainGlutton]

The unspeakable cultural pollution that is Bil Keane’s “comic strip” The Family Circus was at least partly redeemed by making possible one of the most hilarious exercises in black humor ever to grace the Internet: The amateur captioning project known as The Dysfunctional Family Circus. A typical example: We see an original FC strip – Bil is on his hands and knees with Jeffy, in cowboy dress, riding his back. Caption: “That’s right, Bil, it’s a big black bug, and it’s crawling right up your neck. Remember, you can’t lift up your hands, or the floor will know. ‘God,’ thought Jeffy, ‘I live for Acid Thursday!’”

The DFC had a wonderful/horrible/still-wonderful run from about 1992 until 1999, when that fossilized no-talent asshole Keane found out and had his lawyers shut it down. You can read the whole story here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysfunctional_Family_Circus (The 500 DFC pages are still available in an archive at http://www.medmeta.dyndns.org/dfc/index.cgi-list=1.htm.)

When I bitched about it in this thread – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=266178& – Hugh Jass was good enough to e-mail me off-site and advise me the DFC had been revived as the Psychotic Family Circus – at Rubber Beta Buggy Bloggers.. "Click on “The Show That Never Ends,” he said. “And try not to tell too many people.” And until now I haven’t, I swear. It was just as good (or whatever intensive adjective you prefer) as the old incarnation, too.

But, about a month ago, the PFC stopped accepting new captions because none of the images would display. I was hoping it was just a temporary technical glitch. No such luck. The site’s operator, Orrin Bloquy, just e-mailed all contributors that the site was going black, providing a link – http://p079.ezboard.com/fisleoflucyfrm1.showMessage?topicID=169.topic – to a site explaining why:

I was going to post this one to the blog on the main page but felt it better to do it where people could respond.

We are, for the foreseeable future, farked.

Out of business.

Two things changed over the New Year which do not surprise me. First, the IP for the Eff See image server changed, breaking all the links on previous pages. The reason I chose to use the IP in the image links was to lower the search hittability (before I came up with a method roughly equivalent to robots.txt for blocking spiders).

The more important thing is that the Eff See site stopped locally hosting the images and returned to a protected model on a separate server, the kind where the server actually checks the referer and denies the request from strangers. More importantly still, the new Eff See site doesn’t have an option for viewing previous days’ cartoons, so the actual image URL is completely disguised.

I’ve hinted at it here and said it in emails that if they ever did this I would be essentially powerless. Please don’t harass Jeff Keane and/or Bil; this may not have even been their decision to make (the domain belongs to KFS; the server may as well and if that’s the case KFS is pretty bottom-line about remote image linking), and even if it was we should know from the DFC’s ending that these things aren’t worth arguing about.

It was great while it lasted, and I’d like to thank every single one of you who made me laugh until tears ran down my face. And that’s most of you. I’d love to name names, but there isn’t enough space here and I don’t want anyone to feel left out inadvertently.

After 9/11 I thought black humor had been buried permanently. Not long after, a cartoon featuring Jeffy sweating in the hot summer sun, grimacing and clutching a beach ball to his chest was captioned “Mommy, the cancer’s back…” and the laughs were cathartic.

When things were great at home and at work, editing this site was a high. When things sucked, it was a blessed escape. Even through a European vacation, I’m proud to say we kept a minimal backlog you could count in hours rather than days, which only changed in October when most of my free time went to the Kerry campaign.

I’m keeping this forum open. Share your favorite memories, please.

Weeeee’ll meet again… don’t know where… don’t know when…

I’m not technosavvy enough to follow all of that, but it sets a new record for major-league sucktitude! :mad: :mad: Curse you, King Features Syndicate, your CEO and every member of your Board of Directors! May your tongues swell and your genitals wither! May your hemorrhoids resist surgery, and may you never give up on trying! May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits!

(Mods, move this to the Pit if you must. But only if you absolutely must. I think it belongs in CS despite the justly fierce tone.)

[Yumblie]

Personally, I prefer Wholly Functional Family Circus

[Ethilrist]

In the interest of fairness, Greg Galcik (known online as Spinn, the creator of the DFC) said in the goodbye letter for the DFC that he didn’t shut it down because of a cease-and-desist order; he had a long talk on the phone with Bil Keane and discovered that Keane was actually a pretty nice guy, who was just drawing cartoons about a time in his life when everything was cool and fun–he and his wife were both still young, his kids were cute, and life was peachy. And, getting paid to do it!

Galcik realized that continuing to sponsor satire posts portraying Keane as an abusive pedophilic drunk, his wife as a … well, I can’t post what they called her in Cafe Society, but let’s just say, it wasn’t complimentary. In any forum. Anyway, it felt like kicking Snoopy, and he decided he didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and retired the site.

Do note also that the Chicago Reader is not likely to respond well to people using the SDMB to discuss how to pirate copyrighted images off the web and allow people to mock said images, the people depicted in them, and those who own the copyright to them.

People have been known to get in trouble for doing that. From time to time.
Ethilrist
known to the DFC as “Weasel”

Do note that Spinnwebe does sponsor the A1-AAA Americaptions, aka the IADL version 2.0, which solicits satiric captions for user-submitted photographs, not copyrighted materials. Note also that Spinn is, at times, one hell of a funny guy, and has some great stuff on his site.

[BrainGlutton]

@Ethilrist

In the interest of fairness, Greg Galcik (known online as Spinn, the creator of the DFC) said in the goodbye letter for the DFC that he didn’t shut it down because of a cease-and-desist order; he had a long talk on the phone with Bil Keane and discovered that Keane was actually a pretty nice guy, who was just drawing cartoons about a time in his life when everything was cool and fun–he and his wife were both still young, his kids were cute, and life was peachy. And, getting paid to do it!

Galcik realized that continuing to sponsor satire posts portraying Keane as an abusive pedophilic drunk, his wife as a … well, I can’t post what they called her in Cafe Society, but let’s just say, it wasn’t complimentary. In any forum. Anyway, it felt like kicking Snoopy, and he decided he didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and retired the site.

Do note also that the Chicago Reader is not likely to respond well to people using the SDMB to discuss how to pirate copyrighted images off the web and allow people to mock said images, the people depicted in them, and those who own the copyright to them.

Well, of course Keane is a nice guy. What else would he be? None of which changes the fact that the DFC, even if it involved the equivalent of “kicking Snoopy,” was a far more worthwhile comic enterprise than the original FC ever was. As for the copyright issues, King Features was on very shaky legal ground when it comes to use of such images for parody purposes*, and if Galcik had dug in his heels and gone to court, it might have gone either way.
*And double-fuck Disney in every aperture without lubricant!

[BrainGlutton]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_and_parody:

Producers or creators of parodies of a copyrighted work have been sued for infringement by the targets of their ridicule, even though such use may be protected as fair use. The fair use cases addressing parodies distinguish between parodies - using a work in order to poke fun or comment on the work itself - and satires - using a work to poke fun or comment on something else. Courts have been more willing to grant fair use protections to parodies than to satires, but the ultimate outcome in either circumstance will turn on the application of the four fair use factors.

In Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (1994), the Supreme Court recognized parody as a fair use, even when done for profit. Roy Orbison’s publisher, Acuff-Rose Music Inc., had sued 2 Live Crew in 1989 for their use of Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” in a mocking rap version with altered lyrics. The Supreme Court viewed 2 Live Crew’s version as a ridiculing commentary on the earlier work, and ruled that when the parody was itself the product rather than used for mere advertising, commercial sale did not bar the defense. The Campbell court also distinguished parodies from satire, which they described as a broader social critique not intrinsically tied to ridicule of a specific work, and so not deserving of the same use exceptions as parody because the satirist’s ideas are capable of expression without the use of the other particular work.

In a more recent parody case, Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin, a suit was brought unsuccessfully against the publication of The Wind Done Gone, which reused many of the characters and situations from Gone with the Wind, but told the events from the point of view of the slaves rather than the slaveholders. The Eleventh Circuit, applying Campbell, recognized that The Wind Done Gone was a protected parody, and vacated the district court’s injunction against its publication.

So there!