From Jamestown to Binghamton, the Southern Tier is a grand place to find… cartoonists. Some of the best-known, best-loved, most enduring cartoons and comic strips were crafted day after day after day, right here where we live. And we begin on the east, with the “Hart” of Broome County.
Long after Alley Oop, but well before the Flintstones, Johnny Hart brought forth “B.C.,” a deceptively-simple humor strip about cavemen. Bill Mauldin contrasted Johnny’s style with the work of “rivet man” – cartoonists who drew every rivet on the boiler. They could overwhelm the reader with rivets! But place two cave men against a horizontal line, said Mauldin… a line that could be “the top of a swamp or the bottom of an overcast…” and you’d better get that line RIGHT. This, he enthused, Johnny Hart always did. Charles M. Schulz was another enthusiast.
“B.C.” first hit the stands in 1957, which means that the strip (now helmed by a grandson) has been running for just over 50% of the history of comic strips. Johnny was the subject of a WSKG documentary, “Hart of B.C.” – B.C. standing in the case for Broome County, Johnny’s lifelong home. He repeatedly used his characters to boost the community, including wheel-riding Thor on the Broome County buses. (Though one of his gags, as a character contemplated “nothing,” was, “This reminds me of a weekend I once spent in Endicott, New York.”)
That was in “The Wizard of Id,” which he co-created. In 2007, at the age of 76, Johnny Hart died literally at his drawing board.
In his later years Johnny drew flak for bringing Christian religious themes into “B.C.” One in particular showed a menorah transforming into a cross. I’ve studied that strip, and I think what he was TRYING to do was show Christianity’s origins in Judaism, and its debt to Judaism. But even if I’ve read him aright, appropriating somebody else’s religious symbol, and literally transforming it into one of your own, is discourteous and wrong.
With 50 years on “B.C.,” and 43 on “The Wizard of Id,” Johnny Hart racked up almost a century of jokes, gags, thought-provokers, and funny pictures, and he did it for EVERY DAY of 93 years . Al Capp wrote that one of Johnny’s books was “full of genius, and if you happen not to be an older and envious cartoonist, you’re going to have a very good time.” Rod Serling put it even more simply, in the forward to another collection of “B.C.” strips. “Just don’t sit there, Johnny Hart… go ahead and make me laugh!” Mission accomplished, Johnny. In fact, we’re STILL laughing, even at strips we’ve read a million times. Thank you. Rest well.