Prehistoric B.C.

Like many newspaper strips, B.C. was never republished a lot beyond the paperback series of the late sixties. An Australian company did yearbooks, reprinting whole runs in glue-backed magazine sized collections. I have not got a lot of their B.C. reprints, most of what I have i The Wizard of Id, but I do have one reprinting strip with the two unnamed girls through the years. This starts with some very early strips, some even from the first weeks. I couldn't use them in my Stripschrift article because the printing is pretty bad, but their loss is the internet's gain.

The Modern B.C.

In the recent Stripschrift issue mentioned below I mentioned that the B.C. strip has been taken over by Johnny Hart's grandson Mason Mastroianni. I have taken some samples of this strip from the Creator's Syndicate website to show how he is both continuing and reviving the humor of his grandfather. He is helped by a small team of writers including his cartoonist brother and his mother Patti Pommeroy. Patti graciously helped me getting the cover for Stripschrift done and sent me some great photo's of her father and her son and we talked about my interviewing Mason, which I hope to do in the near future. I think they are doing a great job of bringing new life to B.C. A lot of the silly and sarcastic humor of the earlier days has returned and Mason is not adhering to the style of Johnny Hart so slavishly that the thing has become lifeless, as so many continued strips. Rather than getting stuck in a style, they are continuing the heart and humor of the strip.

Here are some samples.





In the old strip, the sundays were often the place where Johnny Hart could show his flair for comic timing. It seems Mason has inherited that gene.



In the next sunday we see a line-up of Johnny Hart's strange beasts, including one that Mason has introduced himself. It appears that he stays closer to the classic look of the strip on the sundays, but the dinosaur is all his.



This sunday celebrates the 50th aniversary of the strip. I am not sure I like the new 'skirts', but fashions do change, even in pre-historic times,



The next sunday commemorates the death of Johnny Hart.



Finally, a classic gag on a current subject.

Encore B.C.

When I was gathering the Bud Blake cartoons I came across four early B.C. dailies. With thousands to choose from these are just four random choices, but I don't come across such early ones a lot. Some of them are no more than decent, but the last one is a prime example of why I would buy a complete edition of this strip immediately. No one makes jokes such as this except Johnny Hart.

More from the Hart.

For the most recent issue of the dutch fanzine Stripschrift I have translated the Johnny Hart interview Richard Marshall did for Hogan's Alley #2. The issue itself has since been sold out, but the interview can still be read in full on the Alley website at:http://cagle.msnbc.com/hogan/interviews/hart/home.asp

It's a long and meandering interview. For Stripschrift I took the liberty of cutting it down and adding informative bridges. I also collected as much rare illustratrations as I could. I think I succeeded pretty well. Johnny Hart's BC has never been reprinted well. There is a whole bunch of paperbacks from the late sixties and early seventies, but they only reprint a fraction of the dalies. There's also one sunday reprint book, that is now out of print and doesn't even turn up that much on e-bay. After that, nothing. B.C. may have been one of the best syndicated strips of it's time - that clearly didn't translate into a good book contract. Recently Checker Publishing did a rather slim book about all five decades of the strip. Johnny Hart even collaborated in the last months of his life. And at least it shows how funny the strip was in the eigthies and nineties still. In fact, it stayed quite good until the end, although the characters were moved to the background in favor of maybe too many wordplay-gags. I hope the book is a big success and one day B.C. will get a complete reprinting in the way that Dennis the Menace and Peanuts are enjoying.

That left me with the opportunity to show many of my never before reprinted sundays from the early sixties and mid-seventies. To that I added one of Johnny Hart's rare advertising examples and a couple of his and Brent Parker's cartoons. I also had room to show a couple of sundays from The Wizard of Id, an equally funny strip that has had only marginally better luck in the reprint department.

But there is never enough room. I have many more B.C. Sundays that I would like to share with you and I will do so over the next couple of days. After that, I will also add all of Johnny Hart's cartoons I could find from cartoon collections and magazines I could find. Some even came in after the magazine had already gone to the printers. After that, maybe it's time for a couple of early Wizard of Id sundays. I have quite a few from the second and third year of the strip, when the look and tone of the strip weren't completely set yet. And maybe a few from the early seventies, just because they are funny.

The best place to find Wizard of Id strips is the yearly reprint books that were done in Australia. I have quite a few of those (and would like to have their B.C. companions), but I am not quite sure if I want to do more than a few samples of those. We'll see how it goes. I have been collecting a lot of interesting newspaper strips from the fifties and sixties, so I could fill the blog only with those. My main interest at the moment is newspaper artists who came from comics, such as Stan Lee and Dan DeCarlo or Howard Nostrand (who did a very interesting strip called Bat Masterson), Jerry Robinson (who did Jet Scott in the early fifties), Bob Powell (Teena-a-go-go) and Joe Maneely (Mrs. Lyon's Cubs). I also fancy doing bits about the early cartoon work of later comic strip artists, such as Hank Ketcham, Virgil Partch and of course, Mort Walker.

If anyone has any wishes or preferences, please let me know.

Among the stuff we had no room for in the interview were these two daily examples of Johnny Hart's sarcastic humor. They are from the seventies and come from the Menomannee Falls Guardian.


We only had room for one Dr. Pepper ad, but here's another one...



As for Johnny Hart's cartoons, I could only find a few. The first is from Dell's 1000 Jokes and the second from a paperback collection of the best cartoons from True magazine. Here are two we couldn't use. There is one more that's still with Ruud Vroman, Stripschrift's wonderful designer. So I will have to add that later as well as any others I hope to find. If anyone has anything to contribute, please contact me privately.




Finally two sundays, from 1962 and 1963 respectively. I will be adding more sundays form the early sixties later, as well as some dalies from all periods. Remember, all this images can be clicked to view larger.




Finally, one from 1961.