Family Circus

One of the best-known features of Keane's work is the dotted-line comics, showing the characters' paths through the neighborhood or house with a thick dotted line. The earliest appearance of the dotted line was on April 8, 1962 (an undotted path had first appeared on February 25). This concept has been parodied by other comic strips, including Pearls Before Swine, For Better or For Worse, FoxTrot, Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, Lio, Marvin, and xcd.

In an interview, Jeff Keane, who now produces the strip, described how he creates the line by drawing one continuous black line and then breaking it into segments with white. The dotted line has taken different formats, such as when the family took a vacation to San Francisco and were shown in a dotted line down famous Lombard Street ("the crookedest street in the world"), or Jeffy and his grandfather taking a walk in the park, with Jeffy running around wildly, indicated by an uneven dotted line, with his grandfather's path as a straight dotted line. Other strips would show the dotted line with captions.