Maybe Dad conceived of it as a way to control us. In the unbreachable box of the comic strip, we could be charming and obedient, and we would stay that way, year after year. Maybe it was his own puerile self-doubt, his lack of self-control - the classic bad-dad syndrome - that made this seem like a good idea. Whatever precipitated it, the Family Funnies made him rich and famous, transformed him from Carl Mix, rotten father, into Carl Mix, middle-class hero, preeminent architect of Good Clean Fun. And it turned us, of course, into objects of public humiliation, imperfect prototypes for our gleaming, dimwitted twins, who were implicitly held up to us as model kids, as everything we were lamentably not.