It’s probably never been anybody’s favorite cartoon strip, but generally Johnny Hart’s BC is as inoccuous as it is uninspired. But in recent years he’s been managing to have his “cavemen” become progressively more vocal in his Fundie viewpoint, even having them trash Bill Clinton and gay marriage over the past few years (how cavemen know about these things… but that’s another story).
But now he’s officially thrown down the gauntlet: B.C. on Darwin
I won’t even go into the myriad of factual errors- I’ll just stop with “aren’t the Sunday comics supposed to be funny?” In fact didn’t they used to be called “The Funny Papers”? If I wanted real statements and viewpoints I’d lobby to get a weekly Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore strip. And how the hell do cavemen living in the time B.C. know about Darwin and Jesus anyway?
Oh well, joining in Johnny’s conceipt I’ll just say
There was a mediocre cartoonist,
whose work had neither genius nor newness,
quite pissed off when he
couldn’t get a tie-in at Wendies
he threw in with the Fundamental loonists.
(Speaking of Fundamentalist cavemen cartoon, I didn’t realize until recently that Alley Oop is now a Fundamentalist Muslim who goes by the name Alley Akhbar.
Found via my friend Andy’sWorldwiderant, promoting atheism, intellectualism and gals with big yabos since 2001 (or thereabouts).
I have an old B.C. collection from the 70’s, and a lot of those strips were hilarious. What a huge waste of ink it is now. Sad. It makes me like Charles Schulz, who seems to have gone in the opposite direction, all the more.
Troy(The Human) McClure: “I hate every ape I see, from Chimpan-a to chimpanzee. No, you’ll never make a monkey out of me.” sees statue of liberty rise up
“Oh my God, I was wrong! It was Earth all along! Guess you finally made a monkey…”
Apes:“Yes, we finally made a monkey…”
All:“Guess/Yes you/we finally made a monkey out of me/you!”
Actually, BC has had fundie views for a long, long time. Early 1980s at least. There were trips just as stupid as that one for the same reason back then.
I’ll agree with what’s been said – B.C. certainly used to be funny, from the 1960s through the 1970s and beyond. I haven’t read it for years (it hasn’t been in any of the papers I get), but from what I hear, Johnny Hart has gone off the deep end.
The thing is, you’d never guess this from the early stuff, or from the guys who did it. In the book Backstage at the Strips cartoonist Mort Walker describes a “creative session” at Hart’;'s house – a bunch of guys sitting around a tapwe recorder, drinking beer and calling out possible setups and jokes, from which unlikely source comic strips would later be distilled. It’s hard to see Hart doing that nowadays.
I used to like B.C. But not since Hart’s gone Fundie.
The funniest one I can recall had B.C. and Peter doing cave drawings. In the first few frames it was antelope and bison and stick men chasing them with spears. In the last frame they drew a pic of the shuttle craft launching. The caption baloon read, “Some day, this is going to put an archeologist in the mental institution.”
Does Hart have any idea how stupid he makes himself look with a strip like that? Amazing.
The thing is, religious sensibilities can be injected into humorous media like comic strips without hurting its entertainment value and can even enhance it. I’m thinking of Charles chultz in particular who often injected Christian mesages into his strips but somehow he did it in a way that never seemed smug or judgemental or stupid and he could be touching even to non-believers. The ending of the Charlie Brown Christmas special is probably the classic example of this (not a strip, I know, but Schultz wrote it and refused to let the network cut the scene of Linus reading from the gospel of Luke).
I think a large part of the reason it worked for Schultz is that he never made his religious commentary divisive. He didn’t create the angry “us vs, them” dynamic that Hart does.
True. There was one Sunday strip in which Sally had a huge secret to impart to Charlie Brown: “We prayed in school today!” No matter how many people asked, Schulz declined to state whether he was for or against prayer in school. He was just acknowledging what was, at the time, a hot topic, without taking sides himself.
