[Infowarrior] - OT: 'B.C.' and 'Wizard of Id' Cartoonist Johnny Hart, 76

[Richard Forno]

(I loved these series......they were both brilliant and funny!)

'B.C.' and 'Wizard of Id' Cartoonist Johnny Hart, 76

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 9, 2007; B05

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/08/AR2007040800
746_pf.html

Johnny Hart, 76, whose comic strips "B.C." and "The Wizard of Id" used
wisecracking cave men and henpecked sorcerers to comment on modern life, and
who attracted controversy when he introduced Christianity into his work,
died April 7 at his home in Nineveh, N.Y., near Binghamton.

Mr. Hart recently completed treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and died at
his drawing table after a stroke, said his wife of 55 years, Bobby Hatcher
Hart.

Mr. Hart became one of the most popular cartoonists of his era, with a
readership estimated at 100 million since starting "B.C." in 1958 and "The
Wizard of Id" in 1964 (with artist Brant Parker). Creators Syndicate
distributed both strips, each of which appeared in more than 1,300
newspapers, including The Washington Post.

"B.C." refers to the age "Before Christ" and also is the name of Mr. Hart's
naive cave-dwelling protagonist, but for years there was little overt
religious plotting in the strip.

Among the characters were the one-legged cave man poet, Wiley, and a
menagerie of talking animals, including an ant, a clam and a lovelorn
dinosaur named Gronk. The female characters were Cute Chick and Fat Broad,
names that were anatomically, if not politically, correct.

For a strip whose tone was lighthearted, "B.C" suddenly became controversial
in the 1990s when Mr. Hart included themes influenced by his fundamental
Christianity and literal interpretation of the Bible. He did so sparingly,
often around holy days, but its inclusion was perceived by many readers as
making him far more frank about Christianity than any of his mainstream
contemporaries.

Some newspapers canceled the strip. Others, including The Post, pulled it
selectively.

On at least one occasion, the Los Angeles Times relocated it to the religion
page. The Times initially canceled the strip -- scheduled to run on Palm
Sunday 1996 -- showing Wiley drafting a poem about Jesus's suffering on the
cross.

Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson told viewers of his "700 Club"
show to protest, especially as political cartoons often criticized religion.
The uproar that followed led the paper to run the "B.C." strip on the
religion page.

Other work by Mr. Hart brought criticism from Jewish and Muslim groups for
what they called insensitive and at times offensive themes.

One Easter "B.C." strip showed a menorah's candles being extinguished as the
candelabra morphs into a cross; the final frame included the words, "It is
finished." To his critics, this symbolized a triumph of Christianity over
Judaism, but Mr. Hart said it was meant to "pay tribute to both" religions.

Muslims were enraged by another "B.C." strip that ran during the Muslim holy
month of Ramadan. It featured an outhouse with multiple crescents -- a
symbol associated with Islam -- and showed a cave man saying from inside the
makeshift bathroom, "Is it just me, or does it stink in here?"

Mr. Hart told The Post he intended the cartoon to be a "silly" bathroom
joke, adding, "It would be contradictory to my own faith as a Christian to
insult other people's beliefs."

John Lewis Hart, a firefighter's son, was born Feb. 18, 1931, in Endicott,
N.Y. As a child, he said he drew "funny pictures, which got me in or out of
trouble depending on the circumstances."

After high school, he served in the Air Force in Korea and produced cartoons
for Pacific Stars and Stripes.

The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and True magazines later published his
freelance cartoon submissions while Mr. Hart worked in the art department at
General Electric in Johnson City, N.Y. While at GE, he created "B.C." and
based many of the characters and their quirks on his friends and family.

"I tried to reduce my cartoons to the fewest words and the least clutter in
the drawing," he said in 1997. "The simpler you do things, the more genius
is required to do it. I used to take ideas as far back as I could take them
-- back to their origin. So cave men became my favorite thing to do because
they are a combination of simplicity and the origin of ideas."

He told an interviewer for a Milwaukee newspaper that he and Parker, an
artist he had long known, started "Wizard of Id" because "I felt I couldn't
get satirical enough as there's no society to work with in 'B.C.' It deals
with the basics, man's foibles and follies. So it was an obvious transition
for me from cave man to medieval times where there is a set society."

Among the recurring characters in "Wizard of Id" were a despotic king and a
drunken court jester.

In a 1999 profile of Mr. Hart, The Post reported that the artist's own
drinking "got out of hand" over the years before he found solace in
religion.

Mr. Hart said he was not from a devout family and "got mad at God" after his
mother died of cancer at 52. He said he struggled with varieties of faith,
including a belief in reincarnation, all the while enjoying the material
success of his strips. He settled on a 150-acre property with a big lake and
a private road.

One day, a father and son team of workers came to install cable television.
They were born-again Christians and kept the television tuned to religious
broadcasts, which Mr. Hart said "hooked" him. "B.C." soon became a prominent
outlet for his interpretations of faith.

"I get incredible response on the positive side," Mr. Hart told the Dallas
Morning News in 1999. "I don't know if it's the liberalization of this
country or whatever [that] has taken prayer out of schools and pulled the
Ten Commandments off the walls of courts, and we've become a nation of
heathens.

"The Christians are still out there, but they're hiding," he said. "They're
afraid because every time somebody tries to make a move, somebody steps on
them and pushes them back or locks them out. So they think that I'm a hero,
and I'm not. . . . That's probably the most pathetic thing of all, that they
admire me and think that I'm courageous and brave to mention God's name."

Besides his wife, survivors include two daughters; a brother; a sister; and
two grandsons.