Comics crushed on the wheel of time

Déjà vu with Lucy Van Pelt

In place of the “eternal feminine,” Lucy from the Peanuts comic strip provides us with the “eternal fussbudget.” This week she spoke a truth laden with irony from the funny pages of the newspaper. The irony was new, generated by the fact that Lucy's words were not. Here is the installment from January 2, 2013, where Lucy is fussing about the supposedly “new” year.

The year, of course, is not the only thing that was “used.” For the uninitiated, the giveaway could be found in the label Classic Peanuts, the sign that Charles Schulz may be long gone but his undead comic has been sucked into the endless time-vortex of the modern comics page. Classic Peanuts had plenty of company. Lynn Johnston's For Better or Worse was shocked back into life with a brisk slap of the defibrillator paddles. The rebooted strip went into reruns, recycling the original strips (ostensibly with some modest editorial oversight and emendations by Johnson.)

At least these recycled comic strips are the actual products of the bylined cartoonists. The late Schulz and the retired Johnston really did write those gags and create those drawings. If you're fortunate(?) enough to have The Wizard of Id in your local paper, you'll see that it still carries the bylines of its late creators, Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, although it has long been in the hands of the uncredited Jeff Parker. It's not really a secret, of course, but it's still a little weird that the current Parker prefers to work without attribution. Perhaps he prefers that today's readers blame the original creators for today's pallid and deracinated version.

Johnny Hart's other brain-child, B.C. is similarly being kept alive by a distribution syndicate willing to settle for the imitative work of the creator's descendants. It works, right? Otherwise, we would not be seeing the cavalcade of strips that will not die: Dick Tracy has outlived Chester Gould, Blondie lives forever although Chic Young is gone, Mark Trail continues his trail-blazing without the help of Ed Dodd, Dennis the Menace still bothers Mr. Wilson in the absence of Hank Ketcham, and Frank and Ernest were inherited by the son of Bob Thaves. This is by no means an exhaustive list, even if it is a bit exhausting.

I admit that I usually smile when I see Classic Peanuts, even though I often recall having seen the strip before. The work of Charles Schulz holds up to repeated readings. In fact, it's usually better than the “new” strips cobbled together from the remnants of the work of the original creators. These latter offerings are often vigorless revenants that stalk the comics pages, their Frankensteinian stitches showing. If you listen closely, you can hear their sad pleas: “Brains! Brains!” But those brains are long gone.

The King of Id is dead

Long live the king?

Brant Parker is gone now. He was half the brains behind The Wizard of Id, which he created in partnership with Johnny Hart. Parker had already turned the job of drawing the comic strip over to his son and was living in retirement in Lynchburg, Virginia. Reports said he was 86 and suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He died just over a week after the passing of Hart, who was still hard at work when he passed away at his drawing desk.

At the Creators Syndicate website, the Wizard of Id page carries the following announcement:

To our editors and readers: Please note that there will be no disruption of service for “The Wizard of Id” comic strip. Jeff Parker has been the artist and co-writer for the past 10 years and will continue his work with the strip.

He was privileged to work under the tutelage of his father, beloved cartoonist Brant Parker, for 10 years before Brant's retirement in 1997. Jeff Parker and the Hart family look forward to continuing a longtime tradition of comic excellence. Thank you for your continued support of “The Wizard of Id.”

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For some reason, I am not reassured.

Is he risen yet?

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

I picked up the Sunday paper and paged through the comics section. Given that it's Easter Sunday, no one could be surprised that Johnny Hart had penned another of his cloyingly Christian comic strips. I had pretty much sworn off complaining about B.C., especially since it had gotten so lame that it just wasn't fun to make fun of it anymore. The Easter Sunday strip, however, tempted me strongly. It had all of Hart's least appealing characteristics: pugnacious proselytizing, pallid humor, and a paucity of invention. And he was supposedly harping on math, so this time it was personal.

Hart devised a goofy joke based on stringing together thirty-three words to signify the age of Jesus Christ when he died on the cross. It wasn't particularly funny and it wasn't particularly inspiring, unless one is already inclined to be thrilled by an extended quotation from scripture. Thirty-three words.

I guess it would be just as clever to try to string together seventy-six words to sum up Hart's career, and his trajectory from an eccentric, off-beat comic wit to a pushy and nearly humorless Bible-thumper. But I haven't the knack or the inclination. This post was originally outlined in my head while driving up California's Central Valley, traveling back home from my parents' residence, where we all met for an Easter luncheon and egg hunt. It was their paper where I first saw today's B.C. and turned up my nose at it (although I can just imagine Mom and Dad nodding their heads in sober agreement with its sentiment and ersatz cleverness).

Most of my thoughts were jettisoned as soon as I got home and checked my blog reader. It was the Comics Curmudgeon who first tipped me off that Johnny Hart had died yesterday, right at his drafting table, doing what he loved best. I guess that's probably the way to go. His legacy will survive mostly in the form of his earlier comic strips, before his religiosity overwhelmed his sense of humor and swamped his off-beat playfulness.

Hart was supremely confident that he had the Truth and that it had set him free. People of his persuasion—anxiously awaiting the afterlife—have one thing that we skeptics lack: They don't risk finding out if they're wrong about life after death. If you're simply extinguished at the moment of death, you get spared all of that stressful disappointment. I think Hart's moment of disappointment has arrived. Of course, he'll never know that (and I, of course, will never know if I'm right), so one could say the disappointment never actually occurred.

I am certainly sincere when I say I hope he rests in peace, but I happen to think it's inevitable.

More prehistoric hilarity

Maybe you had to be there

Having mastered the art of just phoning it in, cartoonist Johnny Hart is now adding the subtle in-joke to his repertoire. The January 30, 2007, installment of Hart's B.C. comic strip has a dog-whistle punch-line that only the highly attuned can catch.


Well, damn me for a heretic and call me apostate! I got the joke! Did you?

Permit me to apologetically explain the likely—ahem—genesis of this joke. I suspect Mr. Hart was taking his ease, calmly contemplating his complete lack of a gimmick for his next strip. As he pondered his plight, his wandering eye lit upon a convenient copy of the Bible. (I assume that Hart has these scattered about his domicile and his work studio. It seems a safe bet.) He decided to do a Bible joke. But how?

Lots of Bibles have extensive glossaries, especially those editions intended as study Bibles and those that use old-fashioned language in need of clarification (King James, anyone?). Noticing that his Bible included a big, fat glossary, Hart knew that God had answered his silent prayer for an idea for a witty comic strip. (God moves in very mysterious ways, you know.) The cartoonist dashed off to his drafting table, and the January 30 strip was born.

I'll admit, though, that I didn't catch the joke upon a first reading. You may not have realized that B.C. rewards a second or third reading, but this was indeed the case. Perhaps you'll forgive me for not being quicker. Being quite unchurched and irreligious, I was initially misled by the glossary reference, the very punch-line of the entire joke. You see, I immediately seized my copy of Colleen McCullough's The First Man in Rome, which I have been reading for several days. It contains a glossary of 117 pages! Naturally I began to think in terms of fiction bestsellers. For some reason, I was then reminded of the Bible. Suddenly I understood the B.C. comic strip and laughed merrily.

For verily I say unto you, Johnny Hart is the biggest joke of all.

B.C. is funny

Funny peculiar; not funny ha-ha

There's an election going on, you know. It's time for humor to take a back seat (way, way in the back) in favor of trenchant political analysis. Our nation's future is at stake, so who better to sound the alarm and speak truth to the masses than the imaginary cave dwellers of Johnny Hart's B.C.? Hart is already on record as disdaining those wicked political pollsters who dare to question the divinity of God's anointed president, but smiting them once is not enough.

In his October 12, 2006, comic strip, Hart cuts through the statistical propaganda of national polls and reveals their true nature: The polls that reveal President Bush's unpopularity are slyly crafted by his enemies to make him look bad. Fortunately, the cartoon characters are here to rescue us from the misleading impression that no one likes our Dear Leader. Here are the first two panels from B.C. (don't worry about the third panel; the supposed punch-line in it is just filler):


Who are these political adversaries of our beloved president? How have they deftly phrased their questions so as to defame him in our nation's hour of need? Well, one such enemy is the notoriously liberal Wall Street Journal:

Bush's Approval Ratings Slip

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
October 13, 2006

President Bush's job-approval rating fell, with 34% of Americans voting him “excellent” or “good,” down from 38% in September, according to a new Harris Interactive poll.

Sixty-four percent of U.S. adults now have a negative view of Mr. Bush's job performance, compared with 61% who ranked him “only fair” or “poor” in a similar poll last month. The drop follows a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that showed the president's job approval rating fell to 39% from 42% earlier in October.

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These are shocking numbers, which B.C.'s neo-con caveman says are due to the way that pollsters frame their questions. How exactly do these arch-fiends phrase their clever questions so as to fool their subjects into denouncing a president they actually adore? Behold!

“How would you rate the overall job President Bush is doing as president: excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor?”

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This is an outrage! The question virtually reeks of radical-liberal cant and bias! Could other polling organizations be as blatant in their contempt for Dear Leader? Unfortunately, the answer is yes, as demonstrated by the Pew Research Center:

“Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president?”

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As you can plainly see, this is a horrific trap for the unwary respondent, making it a fifty-fifty choice between loyal support for our president and treasonous opposition. If either polling organization were willing to give our president a fair shake, surely they could find someone to craft a more fair and balanced question. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has a wonderful staff of patriotic editorial writers. They might come up with something along the following lines:

“How wonderful do you think President Bush is at his job: supremely wonderful, remarkably wonderful, very wonderful, or simply wonderful?”

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See the refreshing contrast between this alternative and the questions from the Pew Research Center and the WSJ/Harris poll? President Bush would undoubtedly fare much better with the responses to the alternative question, proving irrefutably that the pollsters' questions are biased against him. QED!

The Popeye Party

Caveman Curls also notes that Bush's fellow Republican's dine on “Wimpy burgers.” For the uninitiated, permit me to explain the two-fold significance of this charge. First, the classic cartoon character Wimpy is famous for cadging money from his friends and acquaintances so that he can buy hamburgers. He always promises to pay back the loan, typically on the following Tuesday, although he never does. However, it would be a mistake to think that this subtle reference to the Republican tendency to loot the nation's pocketbook tells the whole story.

The second component of the allusion is Wimpy's endomorphism. As a plump weakling, Wimpy is, well, wimpy. Today's Republicans are highly deserving of that criticism, since they never bestir themselves to defend the president or attack his critics. Observe some of their pallid responses to the assaults of Democratic traitors:

David Horowitz: Make no mistake about it, there is a war going on in this country. The aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists who began a scorched earth campaign against President Bush before the initiation of hostilities in Iraq.

Ann Coulter: Democrats long to see American mothers weeping for their sons lost in a foreign war, but only if the mission serves absolutely no national security objectives of the United States. If we are building a democracy in a country while also making America safer—such as in Iraq—Democrats oppose it with every fiber of their being.

Representative Patrick McHenry: And Nancy Pelosi and Rahm Emanuel, I asked them two days ago in a letter, to submit themselves under oath and say clearly, yes or no, did they have prior knowledge of the instant messages and/or emails, and if they did, they're an accessory to this crime because they allowed to keep a pedophile out on the streets.

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See? Wimps, all of them!

Clearly the president needs more stalwart supporters like Johnny Hart, a man who is willing to sacrifice the sporadically humorous content of his comic strip just so he can defend the man anointed by God to lead our nation. And if you don't believe me when I say Hart will sacrifice anything to prove his devotion to George W. Bush, gaze now upon the third panel of his October 12 strip. He boxed himself in with the ranting of the first two panels and left no way out, so he punted with a random punch-line. But that's okay: these are humorless times—especially in the last panel of a contemporary B.C. comic strip.

The B.C. help feature

Creationist comics explained

Johnny Hart wears both his religion and his politics on his sleeve. You'd think his humor would be as transparently obvious as his political stance. It is, however, subtle and elusive in nature. Without proper catechesis, one could be forgiven for thinking it's not funny at all.

The October 11, 2006, installment of B.C. features an encounter between apteryx, the comic strip's resident kiwi, and a burning bush. As you may recall from your Old Testament stories, the burning bush is a manifestation of the Lord God, who assumed this aspect for his chat with Moses. Moses was impressed that the bush was not reduced to ashes by the fire, so he knew it was a miraculous event. And, of course, it talked. His encounter with the flaming shrubbery persuaded Moses it was time to go free his people from Egypt, so it's not a trivial episode in the Hebrew Bible.

Johnny Hart's burning bush is making a miraculous visit to the B.C. comic strip to spread more divine revelation. (Certainly such a manifestation can't be just for yucks, you know.) In this case, it seems that the bush's purpose is to smite the evil pollsters. Perhaps the evil pollsters have enslaved the people, just as Pharaoh enslaved the Jews. There's a lot of heavy symbolism going on here.

Why does God wish to smite the evil pollsters? Because they attack his anointed one by revealing just how unpopular the anointed one has become. The reader may become confused, however, in the way that Hart identifies the bush with George W. Bush, God's anointed one (where, by the way, “anointed” means “smeared with oil”), but this is perturbing only to those who don't recognize the president as a manifestation of the living God. Obviously the pollsters don't, which is why they publish such blasphemies as a dismal 33% approval rating. God's wrath is upon them. But no matter: Hart confidently predicts that our burning Bush will remain proud, unbowed, and charcoal-free. We may all despise him, but the anointed one cares not.

No doubt Hart would recommend that the evil pollsters be slapped into restraints with their eyelids pinned back, forced to watch Jesus Camp over and over again until they, too, want to suffer the little children to come unto the cardboard cut-out of God's anointed one and touch their little hands to those of the stiffened paper Bush idol.

Cursed unbelievers!

And now you know why this B.C. comic strip is so funny and so full of ... uh ... divine goodness.

Once upon a time

Do-it-yourself miracles

If it made sense, it wouldn't have to be a religion, now would it?

Robbie Coltrane in Nuns on the Run (1990)

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The miracle-mongers are ever with us, relying on faith because evidence fails. Believing in miracles is harder work than you might think, since we are told they are everywhere around us. Such ubiquity should keep us in a constant state of wonder and adoration. But no. Transubstantiation and Virgin Mary apparitions in tortillas and oil stains fail to impress. Most (all?) of these miracles fall prey to more parsimonious explanations than divine intervention. The Roman Catholic Church, which has cornered the market on the creation of saints, has to settle these days for nothing more exciting than unexplained recoveries from serious illnesses in cataloguing miracles in the canonization casebooks.

The only really good miracles remain confined to the pages of the various holy books. The Bible, for example, offers such decidedly remarkable events as the healing of lepers, the bestowing of sight on the blind, the restoration of a severed ear, and even resurrection from death. Those are definitely good miracles, but we never see the like today.

This appears not to trouble the irremediably devout. Cartoonist Johnny Hart continues to find something ostensibly humorous in the doubts of nonbelievers and likes to use the panels of his B.C. comic strip to preach at his readers. Today's installment is unusual in that it goes beyond his customary sermonette (see his stillborn sally at science, for example). Hart doesn't just lament the absence of miracles in contemporary life—he does something about it!


All of you doubters out there should feel properly chagrined now. As we can plainly see, a pagan mountain-sitting guru can, after a brief perusal of a complimentary Gideon Bible, generate so much godawful faith that he can topple his mountain into the sea! Ye of little faith had better sit up and take notice, because Johnny Hart's cartoon god is a mighty god. We know this, because it can perform stupendous miracles on behalf of its believers. Mountains into the sea! Wowee!

If I hadn't seen it for myself, I would never have believed it. See you in the funny papers.