Johnny Hart — Genius or Crackpot?
Posted by Kevin Forest Moreau
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Johnny Hart, the cartoonist behind the incredibly long-running strip B.C., died Saturday. Shaking Through has long adhered to an unofficial policy of not speaking ill of the departed, so I won’t bash Hart here for the religious proselytizing that drove me from the strip years ago. (The steady decline in quality certainly helped — to be sure, the strip seemed funnier, and not coincidentally less offensive, decades ago.)
While I enjoyed B.C. as a child, in later years I veered between appreciation and exasperated puzzlement in regards to its amorphous world of cavemen, talking flora and fauna, dinosaurs and anachronisms — to say nothing of its prehistoric baseball teams, bizarre vaudeville-era jokes, groan-inducing puns, etc. I couldn’t decide — and still can’t — whether that strange milieu was as genius in its own way as the similarly multi-tiered settings of other strips or just a sign of an unhinged mind. It’s highly likely that my inability to fully appreciate it as a groundbreaking strip is tied into my bias against its aggressive pushing of Christianity and its unfortunate take on ethnic and gender issues (c’mon — the Fat Broad and the Cute Chick?). Was Hart an opinionated crackpot for publishing head-scratching strips in which walking clams shout things like “Ants got separation of church and state!” (as happened a couple of Sundays ago) or in which a menora turns into a cross, or the one-legged “poet” Wiley scratches out verses about how we’re all going to Hell? Was he a brilliant groundbreaker for creating a strip in which almost anything could happen, an indelible influence on Bloom County and Mutts and countless others?
Is it possible he was both?
One other thing: According to this post on the great Comics Curmudgeon site, it’s possible that family members might continue the strip in Hart’s absence. For reasons I couldn’t state any clearer than Josh does, it’s a bad idea.
April 9th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
We would all do well to learn from Johnny Hart. Through determination and skill he carved out a living in one of the most difficult fields in the world, and he did it so well that by the time his work became stale, unfunny, religeously intolerant, and borderline “guy who rants on streetcorners,” he was so thoroughly ensconced in the daily pulp that no matter how strange or deranged he became, it would be unthinkable to remove him from the pages of your local paper. That’s job security.
This brings Bill Watterson to mind. I miss Calvin & Hobbes, but I have never read a bad one. It bothers me that Watterson retired eleven years ago and deprived me of one of the few pleasures the newspaper had to give, but would Watterson’s work have succumbed to the same decline in quality? Would his inner demons have permeated the strip? Most probably, but he was from a different generation. Instead of religeous rants, he may have given us an entire ouvre of anti-internet diatribes thinly disguised as Calvin’s exploits.
Rather than focus on the last few years of a crazy man, I’d prefer to remember those summer days in the woods, reading a BC or Wizard of Id paperback collection and chuckling to myself as the breeze rustled the leaves above me. ‘Crazy’ can strike anyone anywhere and anytime and if we all start throwing stones not one of us will come away un-bruised.
(Regarding the strip reprinted by the Curmudgeon, Perhaps it wasn’t so much a religeous reference as it was an homage to Rolling Rock beer. 33!)