Monday, April 9, 2007

BC Creator Johnny Hart Passes

Well, the very controversial, but nonetheless talented, creator of the comic strip BC, and co-creator of the strip THE WIZARD OF ID has died.
In 2001 I began to dislike the man, though I had been a fan of his strips for many years.
In 2001, what I, and many others, viewed as examples of Anti-Semitism on Hart's part, began to appear in BC.
I was really annoyed at the way I believed Hart was "clubbing me over the head" with anti-Jewish views, and even considered getting rid of the BC books in my comics collection.
In the same year I married a Christian woman, and, well, I have somehwt relaxed my anger towards the late Mr. Hart.
I still believe that the material he wrote and drew was at times anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish, I am certainly not condoning it, but, we are all stuck here and I can put my own feelings on hold some times, in the interest of living in a peaceful world.

4 comments:

Michael Brown said...

I don't recall any anti-semetic/jewish stuff in his works.

Hart did convert to some form of fundamentalist christian belief. This stuff colored BC to the point where I found it unfunny and annoying. This is not like your sort of 'gentle' christian/religious views of, say, Schultz in Peanuts.

--steve cohen said...

There are at least two srrips that _some_ Jewish people, myself included, consider Anti-Semitic and Anti-Jewish, not the same thing. Others may not consider the strips to be that, but I do, I guess the issue is open to debate. It seems that I may have lost one Jewish member of one of my discussion groups by indicating that I am not as angry at the late Mr. Hart as I once was. I am still angry at his Anti-Jewish-ness, but just not as angry at him, as a person.
We all make mistakes.
As for Schulz, please note spelling, I agree with you most wholeheartedly, except that I wish there was an acknowledgement of Judaism proper in the strip, by it including a Jewish character.
:o)

Michael Brown said...

As I noted, his fundamentalist christian attitude really turned me off from BC. I mainly read the Sunday comics (I regularly read only those daily I really like, like Dilbert and FBOFW, so miss most of them), and thus glance over most of those in my paper's Sunday Comics sections. But BC I would usually only glance at. So if there was anything anti-semetic/anti-jewish I could well have missed it.

Whenever I've heard Sparky's name spoken, I've always heard a 't' in it. That's what you get for not double-checking. But this is a quick comment, not a published article :)

--steve cohen said...

Yes, I get it, that it is a quick comment, but I think we may all be guilty, somewhat, of helping to make mistakes become accepted as fact.
Such tiny errors as leaving the hyphen out of SPIDER-MAN, so often seen in print as Spiderman, do hurt in the long run.
I constantly see Jerry Siegel's name mis-spelled, the co-creator of SUPERMAN does not deserve less than "super" treatment, even though he sure got that for many years.
I will admit that such things are pet peeves of mine, including that so many journalists use "decimate" as a synonym for "destroy", gosh, look it up people!!!
Anyway, rules like "i before e, except after c" do not apply to proper names, maybe some folks reading this blog will learn a thing here or there.
By the way, thanks so much for your participation here, it is greatly apprecaited!!!
:o)