Johnny Hart died of a stroke on Saturday. He was 76.
If you don't recognize his name, either you aren't good with names or you never read the newspaper comics. To the rest of us, Mr. Hart's name, handwriting, drawing style, and personality were as familiar as a weirdo neighbor across the street. His strip B.C. had been running in newspapers since 1958, even while he collaborated on The Wizard of Id (since 1964), and he was a staple of every newspaper's comics page. I first learned his name in a Dennis the Menace strip that, in a strange and strained jab at meta-humor, had Dennis declaring that he had a good idea for a new comic strip. His indulgent dad replied, "I think you should write a letter to Johnny Hart."
I know it's wrong to speak ill of the dead, so please forgive me as I begin with a full disclosure: I was never into the work of Johnny Hart. The Wizard of Id was way too obscure for me (why did the medieval lords make so many golf jokes?), and B.C. too creepy in its Biblical moralizing. Also, I believe that Mr. Hart got a little senile toward the end: for several years it was my hobby to cut out the most incomprehensible B.C. cartoons and display them on my wall for confused guests to puzzle out. This one was my favorite:
Two snakes see a funny-looking bird approaching. The snake on the left says: "I bet he's going to say: 'Hello. I am an apteryx, a flightless bird with hairy feathers.'" The snake on the right says: "You're on."
The bird comes up to them and says: "Hello. I am a snake, a scaly creature who craws on his belly."
Angered, the snake on the left says: "You lie!"
The snake on the right points out: "Actually, no. Historically, it was the snake who lied first!"
The bird flies away. The snake on the left says: "You win."
Looking at the bird, the snake on the right says: "Not necessarily..."
The end. Ha ha! Get it? Hold on, I just spilled tea all over my keyboard from laughing so hard.
Poor old Johnny Hart. His passing doesn't exactly represent the end of an era, since his era already ended so long ago. Rather, it serves as a poignant reminder of that lost era, which ended with barely a whimper, let alone a bang. I refer, of course, to the era of newspaper comics.
I used to love reading the comics, even though they were pretty much on their way out by the time I was old enough to read. My parents subscribed to the New York Times, which has always been too cool to print comics, but my other relatives would save me their copies of the New York Daily News and the Connecticut Post so I could get my Calvin and Hobbes fix. Sure, I owned all the Calvin and Hobbes book collections, but I treasured the newspaper strips: there was something magical about opening the newspaper and seeing my friends in there, bright spots of color between Bill Clinton and Billy Graham.
Side note: I loved Calvin and Hobbes. For the lonely, precocious children of the Calvin and Hobbes generation -- and I suspect we are legion -- it's impossible to convey how profoundly we were affected by Bill Watterson's genius. Like my mother with the Beatles, I can't even talk about it without a dangerous amount of tears and introspection. So I won't try here, except to say that Watterson was to newspaper comics what Stephen Sondheim was to musical theatre. Show me someone around my age with a huge vocabulary, and I'll show you a childhood Calvin and Hobbes fan.
Anyway, immersed in the comics as I was, I couldn't help reading all of them. And, man, were they lame. I'm not singling out Johnny Hart here: the entire comics page was like the most inane time capsule in the world. There was Beetle Bailey and his relevant, topical antics (such as the constant sexual harrassment of Miss Buxley) at the World War II army base. There was lily-white Dennis the Menace and his Fordist family, living next door to Hi and Lois in a white-picket parallel universe. There were The Lockhorns, who taught me that the American man is a horny golf-playing alcoholic, that the American woman is a materialistic housewife who sucks at driving, and that their marriage is both miserable and inescapable. There was Cathy, who was fat, single, and bitter, though we never knew which caused which. We also had Garfield and Gasoline Alley and Hägar the Horrible and the fucking Family Circus...
Perhaps I'm being unfair. We still have some edgy and innovative comic strips in print today, one or two of which aren't even direct rip-offs of Calvin and Hobbes. But the newspapers don't make it easy for cartoonists: if they're not cancelling the more creative strips in favor of time-tested blandness, they're shrinking and cramming two dozen comics onto one page until they're all completely illegible.
That's why the only real reason to read the comics nowadays is to make fun of them. There's an entire Internet subculture devoted to mocking Brad Anderson's Marmaduke. I'm a big fan of Marmaduke Explained, one of the most sarcastic sites on the Internet: every day, its writer painstakingly deconstructs what he aptly calls the "phantom humor" in that day's Marmaduke cartoon. (This is a good one. So is this one. And this one basically sums it all up.)
But, really, why not cut out the middleman? Let's face it: when it comes to comics, print media is dead. The most exciting comic art is on the Internet now, fresh and legible and gloriously full-sized. Penny Arcade and The Perry Bible Fellowship are popular right now, but my heart belongs to Achewood, whose creator Chris Onstad has the most fully realized vision since...well, since Bill Watterson, maybe even Charles Schulz. Achewood (whose title simultaneously conjures up heartbreak and erections) is too profane and, frankly, too weird to get picked up by any mainstream newspaper. But no newspaper could contain the sprawling, vivid, funny-crazy-sad universe occupied by the Achewood characters -- the hedonistic Ray, the melancholy Roast Beef, the innocent Philippe, and the tightly-wound Pat, just for starters -- each with his own personal blog (or magazine or novel), written in his own distinct voice, telling his own distinct but interlocking stories, all written by Mr. Onstad himself. It's a wonderful time for the serial comic strip, if one only knows where to look.
This, however, is a eulogy for Johnny Hart -- and for all of his square, earthbound brethren in the newspaper comics. So before we go hurtling into the wild bright future of comics on the computer screen, let's take a moment to appreciate Mr. Hart and the lost art he represents.
This man -- who always seemed like a pretty decent guy -- wrote and drew B.C. for over 49 years. Sometimes it was dumb, other times sanctimonious; sometimes it revealed bigotry and ignorance. But always it was constant, tedious, nose-to-the-grindstone work, which Mr. Hart -- like the other dinosaurs on the comics page -- performed with humility and diligence, throughout most of our childhoods and into our adulthoods, for the better part of a century.
When this future ends and the next one begins, who among us will be able to say the same for themselves?