Take Hart

The comics page lost another great this weekend. B.C. was #2 in world wide circulation behind Peanuts and it's creator Johnny Hart was certainly close in my heart behind Peanuts creator Charles Schultz too. In the beginning, he was criticized for being too mature, edgy, even and slightly political. In the late 50's & early 60's when he came on the scene, his stuff was a revolutionary as Schultz's but in different ways. His jokes were more like what you'd hear in a cocktail lounge than the family sitcom or vaudeville shtick that had came before. On the other hand, in recent years he had come under criticism for being so unabashedly, unapologetically evangelically Christian. I may not have seen 100% eye-to-eye on some of his conservative-Christian positions, but I completely support his right to use his comic strip as a forum for airing them. I have tons of old Fawcett brand paperbacks of B.C. strips and it was still one of my favorites in newspapers. Mort Walker, Dik Brown, and Bill Keene all had their sons take over their features for them. Johnny was one of the last of his generation. He leaves a gaping hole on the funny pages, but our loss is Heaven's gain. The NEW Jerusalem Post will no doubt enjoy his brand of humor for eternity.

‘B.C.’ cartoonist Johnny Hart dies at storyboard
Creator of long-running caveman comic had stroke at age 76

ALBANY, N.Y. - For millions of comic strip readers, the prehistoric era was a hoot: Cavemen played baseball, ants went to school, birds rode on the back of turtles and snakes made quips.

All of it was thanks to cartoonist Johnny Hart, who died Saturday at age 76 while working at his home in the nearby hamlet of Nineveh. “He had a stroke,” his wife, Bobby, said Sunday. “He died at his storyboard.”

Hart’s “B.C.” strip was launched in 1958 and eventually appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers with an audience of 100 million, according to Creators Syndicate Inc., which distributes it.

Read the rest at MSNBC