B.C. (comic strip)

B.C. was initially rejected by a number of syndicates until the New York Herald Tribune Syndicate accepted it, launching the strip on February 17, 1958.[3] Hart was assisted with B.C. by gag writers Jack Caprio and Dick Boland (who later joined Hart and cartoonist Brant Parker on The Wizard of Id).[4]

When the Herald Tribune syndicate folded in 1966 due to the demise of its parent newspaper, B.C. was taken over by the Publishers Syndicate.[5] That syndicate changed hands and names frequently — Publishers-Hall Syndicate, the Field Newspaper Syndicate, News America Syndicate, and finally North America Syndicate — eventually becoming part of King Features.[6] At that point, in 1987, Hart changed distributors to Creators Syndicate, becoming one of Creators' first syndicated strips.[7]

After Hart's death in 2007, the strip began being produced by Hart's grandsons Mason Mastroianni (head writer and cartoonist) and Mick Mastroianni (writer for both B.C. and Hart's other creation, Wizard of Id), and Hart's daughter Perri (letterer and colorist). (The Mastroianni brothers also created an original strip, Dogs of C Kennel, in 2009.)

For a visual glossary, see Meet The Actors at John Hart Studios.

The characters live, for the most part, in caves, in what appears to be a barren, mountainous desert by an unidentified sea. Background detail is often limited to a simple horizon line broken up by the occasional silhouettes of a stray volcano or cloud. "Retail stores", "shop counters", and "businesses" are symbolized by a single boulder, labeled (for instance): "Wheel Repair", "Advice Column", "Psychiatrist", etc. The February 5, 2012, strip gives a nearby location of 53°24′17″N 6°12′3″W, which is in present-day Dublin, Ireland.

Originally, the strip was set firmly in prehistoric times, with the characters clearly living in an era untouched by modernity. Typical plot lines, for example, include B.C.'s friend, Thor (inventor of the wheel and the comb), trying to discover a use for the wheel. Thor was also seen making calendars out of stone every December. Other characters attempt to harness fire or to discover an unexplored territory, like Peter trying to find the "new world" by crossing the ocean on a raft. Animals, like the dinosaur, think such thoughts as, "There's one consolation to becoming extinct—I'll go down in history as the first one to go down in history." Grog arrived in early 1966,[14] emerging from a miniature glacier which melted to reveal what Wiley called "Prehistoric man!"

B.C., like Hart's Wizard of Id, is a period burlesque with a deliberately broad, non literal time frame. As time went on, the strip began to mine humor from having the characters make explicit references to modern-day current events, inventions, and celebrities. Increasingly familiar visual devices, like the makeshift "telephone" built into a tree trunk, also started to blur the comic's supposed prehistoric setting and make it rife with intentional anachronisms. One of the comic's early out-of-context jokes, from June 22, 1967, was this one:

Peter: "I used to think the Sun revolved around the Earth."

B.C.: "What does it revolve around?"

Peter: "The United States!"

Another early example: Near Christmas time, the apteryx, dressed as Santa Claus, modified his usual spiel: "Hi there, I'm an Apterclaus, a wingless toymonger with batteries not included!" A devout Christian, Hart included didactic references to the death and resurrection of Jesus in Easter installments.[15][16] The Washington Post columnist and comics critic Gene Weingarten suggested[17] that B.C. is actually set not in the past but in a dystopic, post-apocalyptic future.

B.C. follows a gag-a-day format, featuring (mostly) unrelated jokes from day to day, plus a color Sunday strip. Occasionally it will run an extended sequence on a given theme over a week or two. It also follows the convention of Sunday strips with a short, setup/payoff joke in the first two panels, followed by an extended gag, which allows newspapers to trim the opening panels for space. The principal cast is small and varied, with each character imbued with a developed personality. "The art style, like that of Charles Schulz's Peanuts, masks sophisticated minimalism with a casually scratchy veneer," according to comics historian Don Markstein.[18]

Dry humor, prose, verse, slapstick, irony, shameless puns and wordplay, and comedic devices such as Wiley's Dictionary (where common words are defined humorously with a twist, see Daffynition) make for some of the mix of material in B.C. Example: "Rock (verb): To cause something or someone to swing or sway, principally by hitting them with it!"—from an early 1967 strip. Or: "Cantaloupe (noun): What the father of the bride asks after seeing the wedding estimate!"

There are running gags relating to the main cast and to a variety of secondary, continuing characters. One such periodic recurring gag has Peter communicating with an unseen pen-pal on the other side of the ocean, writing a message on a slab of rock that he floats off into the horizon. It is invariably returned the same way, with a sarcastic reply written on the reverse side. These segments use silent or "pantomime" panels (indicating that time has elapsed; night falls and dawn rises) between the set-up and the delayed punch line—typical of Hart's idiosyncratic use of "timing" in B.C.

The B.C. daily strip from December 7, 2006, attracted criticism for defining infamy as "a word seldom used after Toyota sales topped 2 million." The day was the 65th anniversary of the Japanese military's attack on Pearl Harbor, and the punchline of the strip refers to Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Infamy Speech" which requested from Congress a declaration of war against Japan. The day's strip was pulled from at least one newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News. The paper's managing editor said the comic was "a regressive and insensitive statement about one of the worst days in American history."

On July 21, 2009, the strip presented a gag that involved the supposed suggestion of animal abuse. John Hart Studios received many angry responses from readers and issued an apology on their website.[19]

Religious aspect

B.C. strip from April 15, 2001, which prompted complaints from some Jewish groups.

Late in the run of the strip, and following a renewal of Hart's religious faith in 1984, B.C. increasingly incorporated religious, social, and political commentary, continuing until Hart's death in 2007. References to Christianity, anachronistic given the strip's supposed setting and the implications of its title, became increasingly frequent during Hart's later years.

In interviews, Hart referred to his strip as a "ministry" intended to mix religious themes with secular humor.[20] Though other strips such as The Family Circus and Peanuts have included Christian themes, B.C. strips were pulled from comics pages on several occasions due to editorial perception of religious favoritism or overt proselytizing. Easter strips in 1996 and 2001, for example, prompted editorial reaction from a handful of U.S. newspapers, chiefly the Los Angeles Times and written and oral responses from Jewish and Muslim groups who were offended that Hart would include his own Christian beliefs in his strip.

The American Jewish Committee termed the Easter 2001 strip, which depicted the last words of Jesus Christ and a menorah transforming into a cross, "religiously offensive" and "shameful",[21] and accused Hart of promoting supersessionist theology.[22] A 2003 strip depicting a character using an outhouse with a crescent symbol on the front, slamming the door shut, and declaring, "Is it just me, or does it stink in here?" was interpreted by some as carrying an anti-Islam message. Hart responded to the controversy, saying "This comic was in no way intended to be a message against Islam — subliminal or otherwise.... It would be contradictory to my own faith as a Christian to insult other people's beliefs."[23][24] The Los Angeles Times consequently relegated strips which its editorial staff deemed objectionable to the religion pages, instead of the regular comics pages.[25]

• The characters were featured in two animated television specials:
  • B.C.: The First Thanksgiving, first aired on NBC in 1973, was directed by Abe Levitow, and featured the voice talents of Daws Butler (as B.C. and Clumsy), Don Messick as Peter and Thor, Bob Holt as Wiley and Grog, and Joanie Sommers as Fat Broad and Cute Chick.[26]
  • B.C.: A Special Christmas first aired on HBO in 1981, and starred the comedy team of Bob and Ray as the voices of Peter and Wiley, respectively.[27][28]
• The characters appeared in animated commercials for the U.S. federal agency ACTION in the 1970s and for Monroe shocks in the late 1980s. They were also licensed by Arby's restaurants in 1981, which issued a collector set of 6 B.C. cartoon character drinking glasses. In the last half of the 1960s, the BC characters were used in commercials for Marathon gasoline.
• B.C. was turned into two video games for the ColecoVision console and Atari 8-bit family, Commodore 64, and MSX home computers: B.C.'s Quest for Tires and B.C. 2: Grog's Revenge.

Influences from B.C. are found throughout Johnny Hart's home of Broome County, New York. A PGA Tour event, the B.C. Open, took place every summer in Endicott, New York, through 2005 (the final scheduled B.C. Open in 2006 was disrupted by flooding, prompting a change of venue to the Turning Stone Resort & Casino in central New York state). Each year Johnny would bring in a group of cartoonists to play in the Pro-Am. Jim Davis, Mike Peters, Mort Walker, Paul Szep, Dik Browne, John Cullen Murphy, Dean Young, Stan Drake, Brant Parker, Lynn Johnston, and entertainer Tom Smothers would put on a free show for the community, drawing and signing autographs for golf and cartooning fans.

The Broome County parks department[29] features Gronk the dinosaur as their mascot, and Thor riding a wheel graces every Broome County Transit bus. In the past, Hart has also left his mark, free of charge, on the logos of the Broome Dusters and B.C. Icemen hockey teams.

• Best Humor Strip in America, National Cartoonist Society, 1967[30]
• The Reuben, Cartoonist of the Year, National Cartoonist Society, 1968[31]
• The Yellow Kid Award, Cartoonist of the Year, International Congress of Comics, Lucca, Italy, 1970
• Cartoonist of the Year, France, 1971
• NASA Public Service Award, for outstanding contributions to NASA, 1972
• Best Feature Animation Award,[32] National Cartoonist Society, "B.C. The First Thanksgiving," 1973[33]
• The Golden Spike Award – Best Animated Television Commercial, International Society of Radio and Television Broadcasters, "B.C. 'A' We're the ACTION Corps", 1974[34]
• The Silver Bell Award, Best Animated Television Commercial, Advertising Council, "B.C. Tickets for ACTION", 1974
• "The Sam" Adamson Award, Best International Comic Strip Cartoonist, Swedish Academy of Comic Art, 1976,[35]
• The Elzie Seger Award, Outstanding Contributions to the Art of Cartooning, King Features, 1981[36]
• The Golden Sheaf Award and Special Jury Award,[37] The Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival, Canada,"B.C. A Special Christmas", 1982[38]
• Best Newspaper Comic Strip, National Cartoonist Society, 1989

(All titles are by Johnny Hart; published by Fawcett Gold Medal unless otherwise noted. )

On September 21, 2015, Go Comics began reprinting B.C. under the title "Back to B.C.".

• John Hart Studios – official site for John Hart Studios
• Creators.com: B.C. – official site from Creators Syndicate
• NCS Awards