Preach It, Caveman!

For

those of Johnny Hart's estimated 100 million readers who hadn't tuned in for a while, the Easter Sunday edition of his caveman cartoon B.C. may have come as a bit of a shock. The characters were familiar; but B.C. and the Cute Chick were watching the sun set behind a very large cross. As the sun dipped, the cross's shadow extended until it enveloped them. The shadow, Hart explains, was done in blood red to indicate Christ's sacrifice on the cross. The Chick and B.C. were now drawn in white because "His blood has...made us white as snow." In the strip's last balloon, B.C. says, "I stand corrected," which is part of a conversation he has been having, but also a powerful pun: they have been "corrected" insofar as Jesus' blood has washed away their sin.

We are a long way here from Thor developing the wheel or the Fat Broad braining the Snake. The story of B.C.'s periodic lurches into A.D. has been brewing in conservative Christian circles for a while, but got its mainstream outing in the Easter edition of the Washington Post. The piece recounted how Hart, whose combined work on B.C. and The Wizard of Id makes him the earth's most syndicated comics author, bought some satellite dishes. The installers were evangelical Christians, and soon Hart was too. Around 1989 he began doing about five religious strips a year, usually around Christmas and Easter.

Religion is not new to the funny papers: Charles Schulz addresses it in Peanuts, although he notes, "I've avoided preaching, because I am a reasonable Midwestern student of the Bible." Bil Keane's The Family Circus portrays church and even heaven, but in a sentimental, child's-eye mode. Hart's religious strips are hard-core gospel. Last year Wiley's Dictionary, B.C.'s font of wacky definitions, featured "cross reference": no words, just three rags nailed to a cross, bearing biblical citations for Christ's suffering. The effect, for someone expecting the usual caveman shtick, is like finding a Communion wafer floating in the bowl with one's morning Cocoa Puffs.

Is this really a problem? The Post says that it and other newspapers have spiked Hart's strongest Christian statements. They may have been a factor in one paper's dropping the strip entirely. Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. noted, "We don't promote individual religions anywhere in the paper." In a subsequent interview he says he has run much of Hart's religious material, excluding rare strips that could be taken for direct attacks on other faiths or were "very strongly proselytizing, as though it were advertising rather than a comic strip." Meanwhile, the current issue of Focus on the Family, a publication of Christian conservative James Dobson, chides those "determined to find offense" with B.C.

Some of the usual suspects won't jump in. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League told the Post that the cartoons, though "exclusionary" of Jews, shouldn't be pulled. Barry Lynn, head of People for the Separation of Church and State, says, "If I don't like a cartoon, I ignore it. Personally, I would rather they get rid of Mark Trail."

There is probably an issue here somewhere. It is not censorship, since American newspapers have the right to run what they want. Is this another example of religious expression as the only remaining taboo? Or is it that with Christians still the vast majority, the odds of a nationally syndicated strip extolling the Koran are low, and the playing field seems slanted?

Hart, from his studio in Nineveh, N.Y., says he would hate for people to think he's "a whacked-out religious-zealous fanatic"; he would also hate "for people to say I have an open mind," when Jesus is the way and the truth. The Post paraphrased him, saying that Jews and Muslims who don't accept Jesus will go to hell, that homosexuality is Satan's handiwork and that the world may end by the year 2010. The assertions are "really harshly stated," winces Hart, but he stands by them (except the bit about the Jews, who may get a scriptural dispensation). The odds are, they will never appear so baldly in his strip. "Being hurtful is not part of my nature," he says. For years, B.C. has featured the Truth Pedestal, onto which people climb and make fools of themselves. "You know the saying, God wrote the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions?" Hart asks. "You could reverse it. I don't want to be thought of as standing on the Truth Pedestal shouting commandments." He considers. "I'd rather be thought of as shouting...suggestions."