Johnny Hart, creator of B.C. and co-creator of The Wizard of Id, two long-running daily comic strips with a readership of over 100 million, died on Saturday. Although his later work in B.C. was occasionally marred by excessive religiosity, over the years I collected several dozen of his little pocket books and always found them a good pick-me-up when things were depressing.
Mr. Hart will be missed.
Mr. Hart will be missed.
3 comments:
I didn't realise he was so old. I was getting pretty fed up with his later work and was tempted to re-evaluate his earlier work (espcially BC, which I loved) as the product of a character I wouldn't particularly like.
Maybe, in the end, it was just a case of garden-variety dotage, or perhaps of that mysterious brain-wasting and soul-destroying disease older American "liberals" seem to have caught which has turned them into neo-cons; a cure for which we desperately need to find.
Alot of my faves kind of lost their edge as they got older. Peanuts basically was good until the early 80s. Since the humor in it was fairly gentle to begin with, when Shultz mellowed it got kind of boring.
The type of social relevance cartoons have waxes and wanes with the times. When they serve as a critique of established values, they're edgy and subversive and well, funnier. When they're just entertainment or distraction for people who don't like to think too much, they're irrelevant.
We've been in a period like that since the early 90's, I think. I've tried to evaluate the social import the cartoons and animation of younger artists are establishing; so far, there doesn't appear to be any, other than the observation that being really relevant and insightful in the mainstream isn't marketable.
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