by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 04, 2008

B.C. was my favorite comic strip as a teenager. But it wasn't until April that I realized Johnny Hart had continued drawing his strip for a fully fifty years. My best friend had always insisted his own favorite comic strip was "The Wizard of Id" - but this April I realized Johnny Hart was the writer on that strip too. The news reports said that when he died, he was sitting at his drawing table, still cranking out another cartoon at the age of 76.

It was an amazing career. Back in the 70s, there was even a half-hour B.C. cartoon where the cavemen tried to capture a turkey. (Presumably to celebrate Thanksgiving, though the holiday wouldn't be invented for another 6,000 years!) And a few years later B.C. characters appeared in public service ads for the government's Action Corps. I can still remember quoting B.C. cartoons to my friends in high school. I even read paperback collections of the earlier strips from the 1950s.

It was a sophisticated premise, giving a grand scope to even the simplest of jokes. I remember Clumsy Carp waiting patiently for a stone tablet to float back with an answer to his questions, the strange definitions in "Wiley's Dictionary," and the weird conversations between the tortoise and the apteryx. It seemed that as I got older, the newspaper comic strips switched to a simpler style. But B.C. always had a sophisticated subtlety that gave more impact to its punch lines.

Interestingly, Hart lived in Broome County, New York, where he was also born, and he would proudly let county organizations use his characters in official logos. (This meant that the Broome County transit had a picture of one of Hart's cavemen, riding on a prehistoric wheel.)

It's sad that Johnny Hart has left us, but his comic strip will survive him. Even before his death, Hart's daughter and grandson had been involved in producing the strip, and Hart apparently left behind a large number of drawings.

And it's only appropriate. His cavemen seem to magically arrive from the prehistoric era, showing us their first humble missteps with early inventions like fire and the wheel. Maybe Johnny Hart created characters that have transcended time itself!

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