Johnny Hart … ri -something
I was pondering how to eulogize Johnny Hart, cartoonist behind the fundamentalist Christian caveman comic strip “BC”. It is a bit of a cliche to say that the comic strip, after Johnny Hart found Jesus, did not make any goddamned sense by its very goddamned name “BC” — or “Before Christ” (later altered to the more ecumenical “Before the Common Era), but perhaps that is the very idea: Christ is everywhere, even in a mythical time — I guess roughly 6,000 years ago? — before he was conceived.
That was the final Easter edition of BC that Johnny Hart churned out. Pound your head and just move on to “Pearls Before Swine” and “Get Fuzzy”. If we need something as heavy-handed, than we can go to Doonsebury’s latest jab at Bush, which even if you’re a rock-ribbed Republican has the advantage of not falling into strange esoterica. (Is this BC strip in the same genre as the Da Vinci Code?)
In previous years, his Easter strip has gone into the territory of offering up what was viewed as anti-semitic garbage theology. Which is more interesting and scrutible than this one. I suppose we will never know what Johnny Hart would have churned out next year, as he delved deeper and deeper into his biblical studies, into his own mind-field of Christian cavemen and parochial education for Ants.