by John Whalen

TO THE UNWIRED WORLD, BIL KEANE IS BEST KNOWN as the cartoonist responsible for the heartwarming "Family Circus" cartoons, a panel a day in 1,500 newspapers worldwide highlighting the precious antics of Billy, Dolly, Jeffy and P.J., those melon-headed moppets who say the darndest things. On the Internet, however, Keane is better known as a maestro of interactive literature. No other cartoonist has had his oeuvre so interactively reinterpreted by smartass wags bent on putting bad words into the innocent mouths of precocious babes.

"The Dysfunctional Family Circus" Web page (http://www.spinnwebe.com/dfc/) has been soliciting alternative captions to Keane cartoons for years, but you won't find the latest in Keane interactivity on any flip parody Web site. You'll find it on Amazon.com. The online bookseller has a policy of allowing readers to write book reviews, which has proved to be a boon for postmodern Keane-ist expressionism. Someone signing on as "Sir Arthur H. C. W. Cholmondeley-Upham-Lee, OBE" convened the salon last month with a review of Keane's tomes titled "Keane's Christian existentialism shows true mastery."

"Keane," wrote Sir Arthur, "depicts his blazingly erudite, occasionally brutal truths through the unique choice of his inimitable medium -- stark black-and-white drawings of American suburban and family life. Interestingly, Keane chooses to add colour to his works one day out of seven -- the Sabbath, a clear nod to the Judeo-Christian ethos."

Several days later, "A reader from Illych, Russia" chimed in, "Keane has changed. Let's follow him. In the last three decades we have followed Keane from his dingy beginnings of SoHo subway grafitti to last year's dangerously provocative show at the Guggenheim (Mr. Warhol watch out!!)."

Within a week, half a dozen critiques had been posted, most gangly with graduate-studies syntax. "Although not as intense as 'Jeffy's Looking at Me,'" wrote a deconstructivist from Mississippi, "this text poses Keane's remark of the other: not me/I don't know. As Foucault once remarked: Jeffy is the extension of the apparatus, the ill-fitting shoe, the intertextual echo of a system trapped within itself, struggling to exist."

True to its promise, Amazon.com hasn't censored the occasional unfavorable comment: "Where is the fin-de-siècle angst that gripped Keane's earlier work?" asked a critic from Missouri. Are Jeffy and P.J. just doomed to wander in a Beckett-like trance through a world devoid of gravity (in a metaphoric sense) and possibility? . . . Mr. Keane clearly has lost his edge, and now seems to be pandering to the lowest common denominator."