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."