Johnny Hart is dead

Johnny Hart, creator of BC and co-author of The Wizard of Id, died at his drawing board today of a stroke. I used to like BC an awful lot, but not for years. The strip hasn't been very funny ever since Johnny got religion, the really obnoxious kind that says that his and only his version of Christianity is going to Heaven and that they KNOW, and everyone else's version of Christianity is a deluded fool who's been taken in by Satan.

They have meds to treat this kind of psychosis. Electroshock. Deconditioning. All kinds of things. But it's a repulsive disease, particularly when you've seen it a few hundred times already. And just how am I supposed to believe that this particular fruitcake has been given the One True Word when all the other fruitcakes are saying the same thing? It smacks of hubris to me, it really does.

Well, Johnny's dead now. He can argue about how right he was with Jesus. I had had hopes that the strip would cease, but it's likely to keep going. According to the obits, his family has been doing it for some years now, with him weighing in only occasionally. (You know, that may have been the trouble, which is even worse: we'll have an unending supply of the same drivel with no hope of anything better. Nothing like a long slow literary decline, or however you say that about comic strips.)

Johnny Hart is dead