h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Dead at 76, of a stroke, apparently. Sitting at his drawing board.

Johnny Hart was a pioneer in the minimalist school of strip cartooning. Charles Shultz was a Rembrant compared to Mr. Hart.

Responsible for two strips, "B.C." and "Wizard of Id", Hart took the panel cartoon concept of gag writing and drawing to new levels with his strips. Basically, he set up stereo-types and then beat them to death. Once they were dead, he resurrected them by twisting the original banality and adding absurdity to it.

"B.C." ia a caveman comic strip. Dinosaurs, snakes and ants, with an occasional fish thrown in for fun are rampant. There are also two females, the Fat Broad, who carries a club to beat up the Snake with (I'll let you figure out the iconic image for yourselves) and the other woman, who I think was called the Cute Chick. Right off the bat we get a sense of the 1958 mental milieu that Hart was working off of when he finally got picked up by a newspaper syndicate after fivc others had rejected him.

The cavemen are a motley crew, including one with an eyepatch and a pegleg who serves as the baseball team coach. Another wears glasses.
A third has a crewcut. Then there is the putative star, B.C. himself, who supposedly is based on Hart's self-perception.

As a child I was exposed to this strip through collections that my father had in cheap paperback books. He also had "The Wizard of Id", "Tumbleweeds", "Pogo" and "Peanuts". I think he also introduced me to the concept of "MAD" magazine, though I don't remember ever seeing any around the house.

To a four or five year old, BC is a dream comic, just as "Peanuts" is. The lines are simple and even sophomoric and the gags, even the one's that went over my head, were basic and memorable. In the days before the internet and cable TV, comics were a wonderful way to connect with the usefulness of line and shadow and language.

In recent years Hart became a "Born-Again" Christian. A simple, straight-forward kind of chap, that sort of thing couldn't help but become part of his strip. He indulged in all sorts of metaphoric and philosophic imagery and language, having a lot of fun along the way, and intriguing and enraging both the secularists and the religionists. One paper in Los Angeles refuses to run his themed comics on the comics pages. On the days when he gets all misty-eyed and Christiany, they run those strips on the "religion" page. Mr. Hart thought this was funny, particularly since the only other famous strip that had been treated so discriminatorily was Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury", which was relegated to the OpEd (opposing editorial) page in many papers across the US.

Well, Mr. Hart is dead, apparently doing what he did best. His family says that he have years worth of material to work off of, so his strips, which have been finished by help from the family and staff for years, will continue to flow from the Creators Syndicate for many years. The Creators Syndicate is a group of artists and cartoonists who broke free from the standard contractual miasma of the old newspaper syndicates and took control of their own creations. Previously, and in some cases, still, if you had a syndicate sending out your strip to the papers, they paid you what they wished and kept control of the copyright and the editing of your strip. You were just an employee. If you died or got recalcitrant or started to slip, then the syndicate could take your creation from you and let someone else do it. If you decided to go to work for someone else, then you left your baby behind and had to come up with something almost but not quite unlike what you had been doing before. And you could get sued for copying your own style too closely... A la John Fogerty, which see.

Anyway, Johnny Hart, one of the last of the old time cartoonists, is dead. His work was celebrated hither and thither throughout his life time and he was one of those fellows whose creations had a second life on coffee cups and jelly glasses and Frisbees and and... Nevermind. His characters were also used to sell cigarettes and petrol and insurance...

He died in a town called Ninevah, if I remember correctly. How absolutely fascinating.

'Dead at 76, of a stroke, apparently. Sitting at his drawing board.' I imagine that that would be a good way to go - doing what you love best. When I saw Johnny Hart, I thought of that bloke who does stuff for children on TV. Having had a quick look, this chap isn't the same. Who was I thinking of, I wonder?

Ah, I was thinking of Tony Hart: http://www.tonyhart.co.uk/ - he's getting on a bit.

aha!