Johnny Hart, creator of BC, reportedly died at his drawing table from a massive stroke.
I’ve enjoyed his work for years. For some reason I always got a kick out of one strip I read years ago, in which Pete is extolling the virtues of a new invention that perform an entire host of unrelated tasks, including rotating your tires. And BC asks him, “Can it stampede a herd of crippled yaks?” Pete admits it can’t. “Then what good is it?” asks BC. To this day I will still occasionally ask if something can stampede a herd of crippled yaks. No clue why. It’s just one of those jokes that’s purely individual, lodging in the cerebral cortex.
Also, speaking as a Jew, I never had any problem with his more controversial strips that were intended to be articles of his faith. Talk about overreaction. It was his strip to do with as he pleased. If he wanted to depict a menorach morphing into a cross, then, y’know, fine. Whatever. Considering the type of material that’s been the subject matter of such strips as Doonesbury and For Better or Worse, it’s a little late to start claiming the comics pages should be free of controversy. Considering Judaism has survived five thousand years of assorted nations trying to destroy its practitioners, I certainly think we could survive a couple of Sunday comic strips.
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(On the other hand, I can certainly understand the desire to read something more into it than is actually there, because the joke itself is pretty weak.)
Yeah, that’s why I suspected there was more to it than just a bad smell. Also, as the article says, why make it nighttime when that’s so much more trouble for the artist?
I don’t know if I’d have interpreted that strip this way if the alleged meaning hadn’t been spelled out. I think I would have, because when I saw it for the first time I thought “wow, that really does look like it says ‘Islam'” but I don’t know.
Since there’s nothing more to go on than suspicion I suppose it’s best to let it drop and for me to try and give him the benefit of the doubt.
I have many of the B.C. paperbacks from the sixties and seventies, and I really do think the strip was funnier then. Thor’s inventions, B.C.’s forays as the Midnight Skulker, Wiley’s phobias…all pretty good stuff.
I didn’t read the strip for a long time, ten years or more, because it wasn’t in the paper we subscribed to. When I started reading a paper that carried it, probably in the mid-’80s, I thought the then-less-frequent evangelical strips were an odd choice. What I thought was an odder creative choice was his decision to name the women (who are never called by name in any of the paperbacks I have) “Cute Chick” and “Fat Broad.” In retrospect, I wonder if that wasn’t a deliberate poke at people who might find those terms offensive. After all, all the male characters have regular names, including the turtle and the pig (OK, “Oynque” isn’t exactly “John,” but still…), but the two female characters are given generic descriptions.
Myself, I’ll be interesting in seeing if Hart’s death affects the strip’s circulation. My local paper dropped “Andy Capp,” “Shoe,” snf “Apartment 3-G” not long after the death of their creators. We still have “Dennis the Menace” going, but it’s handled by the crew Ketcham had been farming the work out to for some time. Similarly, I doubt if “Garfield” or anything connected to Mort Walker will go away very soon after Walker or Jim Davis pass on.
“Posted by: Peter David at April 10, 2007 10:12 AM
“All I know is that this year is Jewish year 5767, and that this number refers to the creation of the world as described in the bible.”
Okay. Well, that being the case, man was created on the sixth day. So I suppose it depends how many years passed between creation and the birth of Abraham, the first Hebrew (or, if you prefer, when Moses first accepted the covenant.)”
I don’t know exactly at what year, according to the ancient rabbis’ calculations, Abraham and Moses appeared. I think what they did is count the geneologies from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to Jacob, and then 400 years to Moses. After that, I don’t know. But of course these are the religious calculations of people interpretng a text refering to mythical times. Modern historians have their own calculations and considerations. And they have Moses somewhere around 2200 BC, I think. We also have to ask ourselves if there really were a Moses and Abraham, or are they mythical figures that were created to explain the existence of Judaism. We have to ask ourselves how Judaism was developed in the real world, ho it was shaped, when were it’s traditions invented, and so forth? I don’t think the answeres will amount to 5000 years, but even without this number the antiquity and survivability of Judaism speak for themselves.
corrections: 1200 BC.
>I suppose it depends how many years passed between creation and the birth of Abraham, the first Hebrew (or, if you prefer, when Moses first accepted the covenant.)
It might be more complicated than that if you buy into Gerald Schroeder(PhD Physics)’s theory that one way to account for the discrepancy between the Bible and scientific measurement of the age of the universe is if time flowed at a different rate early in the universe’s existence. Given some cosmologists’ belief that the universe may have had a burst of ultra-fast expansion (light speed if not faster) very early on, relativity could have screwed time up royally. I don’t pretend to have the math to figure out whether it’s so much flotsam, but it is fun to think about.
“man was created on the sixth day”
I always wondered–if god is GOD, why did he need 6 days to create everything? Couldn’t he/she/it do everything at once?
And why did he need to rest on the 7th day? He’s god–he’s supposedly the be all-end all of everything. Why would he NEED to rest after creating ‘stuff’?
Sorry. But I believe in Thor, Odin, etc. about as much as god, jesus, etc.
“man was created on the sixth day”
It gets even more confusing depending on the Bible you own. I’ve seen more then a few versions that reference the creation of man twice in the first six days on two different days. It’s just that they only go into the “Adam and Eve” details on the sixth day creations.
“And why did he need to rest on the 7th day?”
Come on… He’d just become a new dad. That’ll wear anybody out.
“It might be more complicated than that if you buy into Gerald Schroeder(PhD Physics)’s theory that one way to account for the discrepancy between the Bible and scientific measurement of the age of the universe is if time flowed at a different rate early in the universe’s existence.”
Religious natural scientists sometimes seek to reconcile the religious story and science by finding proof or explaining the biblical stories. However secular people prefer to think that the bible is not science but the mythology of one ancient nation — even if one apparently more enduring and perhaps more powerful in some way.
“And why did he need to rest on the 7th day? He’s god–he’s supposedly the be all-end all of everything. Why would he NEED to rest after creating ‘stuff’?”
If you do not read the bible as truth, but as a mythical historical text, the answer to this question lies in understanding the intentions of the people who wrote it. Part of the answer is that there was a time when the bible was the story of a young people surrounded by much more ancient cultures, and the story of genesis is a response to the Sumerian or Babylon mythology.
However, I’m sure that between them Jewish Rabbies and Christian theologians have come up with detailed religious answers to this question. Whether these explanations are satisfying, I do not know.
“It gets even more confusing depending on the Bible you own. I’ve seen more then a few versions that reference the creation of man twice in the first six days on two different days. It’s just that they only go into the “Adam and Eve” details on the sixth day creations.”
I don’t know how it is in the Christian bible. But the hebrew bible has two genesis story, the seven day story and the Adam and Eve story. I learned that these two stories are from two different sources. The Adam and Eve story is the more ancient legend identified as source J for Jehova, while the more schematic seven day story is the result of a later source called P, for priests, who wrote it in competition to other mythologies.
However, you should take what I say with some caution, a research further if you want to know about it. What I know is the result of what I learned in high school. I’m not an expert.
I was just watching a show about biblical research, and the experts talked about the Jewish people forming around the beginning of the first millenium BC. So only 3000 years. How embarassing.
Hmmmm….
I still think it was the new dad thing. His children weren’t the greatest things to come along since sliced bread.
Adam was dumb as a brick and would do whatever Eve told him to do and Eve kept hanging out with the wrong crowd and disobeying God every chance she got. A girl like that… No wonder he has so many grey hairs in all those old portraits of him you see in church.
Creating a world is hard, very hard, the guy deserves some downtime.
>Creating a world is hard, very hard, the guy deserves some downtime.
The red tape is mind-boggling. Just the environmental impact forms alone …
I also found the early B.C. to be funny — Thor inventing the steering wheel, or power brakes, leaps to mind — but the proselytizing strips just killed the funny for me.
His 1999 interview w. the Washington Post didn’t help matters any…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A99035-1999Apr4
He says:
Jews and Muslims who don’t accept Jesus will burn in Hëll.
Homosexuality is the handiwork of Satan.
America was founded as a Christian nation, and should remain one. The country’s moral decline began the day that prayer in the public schools was outlawed.
Angels travel at the speed of thought. Some are the lackeys and stooges of the Devil, and they whisper temptations in our ears.
God probably engineered the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin as punishment for trying to give away holy land in violation of biblical commands.
The end of the world is approaching, maybe by the year 2010.
And:
Johnny Hart is going straight to Heaven.