| Johnny Hart |
B.C. cartoonist has bigger panels to draw and fewer words to say
By John H. Adams
The Presbyterian Layman
Volume 32, Number 5
Posted November 11, 1999
Johnny Hart, creator of the comic strip B.C., is planning his magnum opus. Actually, he has been planning it for a long time, even began drawing it on brown wrapping paper and hanging it around his studio.
But he quickly realized he was creating a 90-foot cartoon, and that was too long even for a magnum opus, so all the paper came down and he began editing the panels in his head. Now the projected strip is down to 20 feet. Maybe 30.
So what’s a 20-foot comic strip?
The story of the Bible, Hart says matter-of-factly, to be used in the 9th-through-12th grade Sunday school class that he teaches at Nineveh Presbyterian Church in New York.
Hart’s aim is to make the Bible simple, powerful, compelling, life-changing – and fun.
Committed to Scripture
He is committed, ahem, Hart and soul to the authority and infallibility of Scripture, but the cartoonist emerges when he teaches. He sometimes takes poetic license with the text. Knowing that his students would never remember that Noah’s three sons were named Shem, Ham and Japheth, Hart changed them to Ham, Sham and Alabam – with apologies to Moses. He once used a cartoon illustration of Cain killing Abel with, you bet, a cane.
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| Johnny Hart |
He is also known as an unabashed Christian, and he doesn’t apologize for being a Presbyterian, although, like other evangelical Presbyterians, he is dismayed when the denomination strays from its Biblical roots. When he served on the session at Nineveh Presbyterian Church, Hart was not above recommending a fiery letter to PCUSA headquarters criticizing some of the denomination’s off-the-wall hijinks.
Compressing the big thoughts
But today, he’s mostly focused on his Sunday school class and making the Bible come alive through a mural that will include, of course, cartoon characters wearing robes and sandals. More important than graphics, however, is that Hart is obsessed with compressing big thoughts into a few powerful words. Hence, his struggle to whittle the size of his Sunday school mural about the Bible.
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| The cartoonist emerges in Johnny Hart while teaching Sunday school |
Well, Hart has probably read it all. A room in his house is a veritable seminary library. He also stocked a library at Nineveh Presbyterian Church with books, audios and videos. He did the design and carpentry for the library, saying he sensed the joy that Jesus felt as a carpenter and thinking that “it must have been hard for Him not to make the universe out of wood.”
Providential themes
Hart has been irrepressibly Christian since 1977, thanks to a couple of itinerant satellite dish salesmen. He speaks with an almost mischievous joy as he unfolds that story and its providential themes during an interview with The Presbyterian Layman.
He and his wife, Bobby, were living in Endicott. A real estate agent told him about a house in Nineveh on 150 acres, including a 28-acre lake. They bought it.
They began remodeling the house and building a studio with the help of a carpenter, who lived nearby and had a vacant lot next to his property. A satellite dish salesman asked the carpenter if he and his son could use the lot to set up a display. The carpenter agreed.
What’s more, the carpenter introduced the satellite dish salesmen to Hart, who realized that his new residence “had no cable system and no television reception and life can’t go on without television.” So he ordered not one satellite dish, but two – one for the house and one for the studio.
The job was complicated. “It took maybe a couple of months or more to get it set up by two guys, a father and son team who were born-again Christians,” Hart said. “They were running cables into the various rooms where I might have TVs. I have at least three over here in the studio and three at the house.
Religion or country music
“Every time I would walk through the place and they were testing the system they would be broadcasting the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They were using a religious channel as a test pattern to set everything up. I said, ‘Guys, is this all we’re going to get?’ ‘Oh, no, no, Mr. Hart,’ they said, ‘we could use the country music channel if you want.’”
At that defining moment in his life, Hart chose TV religion over country music. “I’d sneak over and open the door a crack so I could hear the TV preachers,” he said. “I never let my wife know. That wouldn’t be cool. Our lifestyle was a tad different.”
Hart developed a hankering to go to church. The only one in town was Nineveh Presbyterian Church. “I drove by the Nineveh Church one Sunday morning. People were just getting out of church. It was a big white church with a little porch and a couple of parking lots on both sides. All the people were dressed up. The children were wearing little suits and little dresses and running around and climbing around cars. Something touched my heart. I remembered all the times in the South when we used to go to church, have dinner on the grounds, the flowery dresses, kids climbing trees, kicking each other.
Weird question, prayer
“I said to Bobby one morning shortly after that, ‘Hey, like to go to church?’ and she looked at me like I’m kind of weird and said, ‘No, not really.’ And I said, ‘I thought I’d just throw that out there.’ But I secretly prayed that God would touch Bobby’s heart, and only two weeks later, she comes bounding in and said, ‘Want to go to church?’ I said, ‘Naw, not really.’”
But Hart was joking. He quickly corrected his answer to yes and they were off to Nineveh Presbyterian Church. “We enjoyed the dickens out of the preacher there. Loved his sermon. He had a yoked thing going. He’d preach at Nineveh and then go do the same thing up the road at Afton.”
“I said to Bobby, ‘Want to have some fun? Let’s run up to Afton and see if he screws up. We went in and sat down about halfway back, and he comes walking in and does this incredible double-take and asks us ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘We’ve come to hear you preach. We want to see if you do it again the same way for Afton.’”
That began a long friendship. Sadly, Hart says, the young minister and his wife were later divorced. “That happens in a church when the devil really gets in there. But I think the interim ministers actually sparked the church and we are flourishing spiritually now, with a new young pastor.”
Incorrigibly optimistic
Change doesn’t seem to faze Hart. He is incorrigibly optimistic. “I think God arranges these things. It’s something the church needed.”
Hart loves the Nineveh congregation, and especially his Sunday school class. Two of his former students are in seminary. But he doesn’t take any credit – not even for their attendance. “Do they come because of my infamy? No, they come because their parents tell them to come.”
But his class also attracts a few adults who attend without marching orders from parents.
“I try to widen their eyes, anything I can think of to do that,” Hart says. His favorite lesson series is to do an overview of the Bible, which itself is “like a banner, a long drawing that starts with Adam and runs through the New Jerusalem.”
Hart begins verbally constructing the panels for his great Bible mural: “There’s Adam and Eve. They screwed up. They had children. One was good and one was bad. Ultimately, God had to clean them up with blood. They all goofed up and were born into sin. God knew it. He knows everything that happens. The blood sacrifices extended the lives of all humanity. There’s no remission of sin without the shedding of blood. Finally, God says, I am going to shed my blood for them. I will take their sins. I will give them my righteousness. They’re invited into my paradise with me.”
At this point, Hart is talking a mile a minute. He’s almost breathless.
But not all share his enthusiasm for the Gospel.
B.C. too much for L.A.
For the past four years, The Los Angeles Times has refused to run his cartoons with an explicitly Christian message. For a while, Hart was peeved, and even called his syndicate to suggest that they not sell the strip to The Times. The syndicate suggested otherwise, and Hart calmed down. But upon reflecting on what it means to be a Christian, Hart says he’s now delighted to sell to the The Times even though they still yank his Christian messages. He’s killing The Times with kindness. More than 90 percent of the mail on the controversy is on Hart’s side. Thanks to The Times Hart’s Christian cartoons are often repeated in stories about the brouhaha. The Gospel spreads far beyond The Times’ censorship.
The strip that started the flap with The Times was for Palm Sunday. It had Wiley – a wannabe poet in B.C.’s cast of characters – sitting against a tree, tablet in hand, writing a poem titled “The Suffering Prince:”
The Suffering Prince
Picture yourself tied to a tree,
condemned of the sins of eternity.
Then picture a spear, parting the air,
seeking your heart to cut your despair.
Suddenly – a knight, in armor of white,
stands in the gap
betwixt you and its flight,
And shedding his
‘armor of God’ for you
– bears the lance
that runs him through.
His heart has been pierced
that yours may beat,
and the blood of his corpse
washes your feet.
Picture yourself
in raiment white,
cleansed by the blood
of the lifeless knight.
Never to mourn,
the prince who was downed,
For he is not lost!
It is you who are found.
‘Running from Nineveh’
Nineveh, just by its name, has something to do with Hart’s commitment to Jesus. “We’re all running away from Nineveh,” Hart said in an allusion to Jonah. “But look at Jonah. He says eight lousy words and saves an entire city, a city so big that it took three days to walk across.”
So, considering himself a latter -day Jonah, belched up on the outskirts of Nineveh, N.Y., Hart is trying to figure out a way to say more with fewer words, trying to get his banner down to a few feet, trying to create the next cartoon with simply a line for the horizon and a word or two.
That is, if a picture is worth more than eight words.
