Let There Be Reign

Johnny Hart, the creator of the comic strips The Wizard of Id and B.C. has died. He was 76. Mark Evanier has a brief obit for him, with which I largely agree. Like Mark, I had about a baker's dozen of the Wizard of ID paperbacks (such as the one seen below) when I was growing up.

That strip, produced in collaboration with cartoonist Brant Parker, had some lines which are still rattling round my head almost some 40-odd years after they were written. Though B.C. was never really my thing, with one or two exceptions.

But also like Mark, I was irritated by Hart's later move into syndicated comic strip evangelism, in a way that I never was when Charles Schulz referenced Scripture in Peanuts. This is most likely because Schulz never became rigid, or humorless. He knew his Bible and it naturally informed what he had to say through his characters, but Schulz's attitude seems summed up by the strip in which Snoopy thought:

"I'm writing a book of philosophy. I have the perfect title: Has it ever occured to you that you might be wrong?"

Hart's Christianity, by all appearances, was of the "My way is the one and only true way" variety. But as with Bob Clark, at a time like this, a man deserves to remembered at his best, and I have many fond memories of Hart's work.



He gave me a lot of smiles.