Current mood:
dirty
Johnny Hart, for those of you who don't know, was the once brilliant creator of the comic strip "BC." He also, along with Brant Parker, created "The Wizard of
Id." Later in life his work became pretty mediocre (alas). He found god (sorta) and for the rest of his life his work vacillated between mediocre, preachy and on occasion, amazingly bad.
What's bugging me is that most of the people who write these eulogies only write about the part of his life that serve their purpose.
Some write about the good old days, and ignore the last 2 decades of Hart's life. This is bull shit. If I was writing a eulogy of Jeffrey Dahmer and didn't mention that during the last few years of his life a good number of the neighbors ended up stuffed in his freezer, then I wouldn't blame teacher for giving me an "I" for "incomplete."
The other camp tries to rationalize the last 2 decades as some sort of tribute to god. I'm an evangelical atheist, and I'm really getting tired of being the only one around who defends god (Well, me, Barry W. Lynn and Kinky Friedman). When did this become my job? I'm a freeking atheist for god's sake!
Sigh! All right, one more time...
If you find god, and become a bigger dick, then you didn't find god. You found yourself (a dick) and called it god (because you're a dick). God is surprisingly easy if you pay attention.
The last camp are the dorks that wrote as if every single line Johnny Hart drew after 1980 was a pushy god references.
I hate when "my" side goes asshole!
Yes, Johnny Hart's best work was back in the 70s. Yes, he was chock full of that self glorifying religion that mocks Christ and would put a Pharaoh to shame. Yes, some of his jokes required a research grant to figure out, and were never worth the paper work. I get it!
However, sometimes a smoke is just a smoke, Jeffery Dahmer was just eating a pork chop, and sometimes a lame joke is just a lame joke.
I think people the biggest offenders were the people who saw more than a really (no, really!) lame joke in the 11/10/03 "Islam-Slam" strip. It was just a impressively lame joke. By getting offended you ended up making our entire species look stupid.
This last part involves necrophilia.
Johnny Hart died rich. So rich that his family could start collecting cocaine for the rest of their lives and still die rich themselves. They don't need to fuck Johnny's corpse.
But they're gonna!
BC will not die! Nor will it be rerun or drawn by another artists! That would be too classy.
What they're going to do (I'm not making this up!) is scan in his strips, cut and paste the characters and write new captions. It's zombie BC!
If Hermann Goring wrote a comic strip, I wouldn't wish this fate upon it.
What they should do is dig up his corpse and physically have sex with it. Once they get that out of their system, start reprinting every one of the BC strips, in order, as a series of books.
I'll be first in line for each book, right up to the point where "Clams Got Jesus."