Hart: Yeah. [laughs] But this was bizarre; I can’t remember what I told him. I think I told him about it, but I never had the presence of mind to even ask him if I could have a photocopy or anything. Or even ask him if I could have one of the drawings. It just didn’t occur to me to do that. It was too spooky.

Marschall: I want to ask you about the other cartoonists in this part of the country. Jim Whiting has told me about the group that used to get together...Were a lot of guys you knew aspiring to get into the business?

Hart: Jim Whiting; Reg Hider from Rochester—he was one of the magazine cartoonists that was selling at the time—Brad Anderson, I met Brad later. Anyway, there was Brant Parker and myself. And Jim Whiting and Joe Daley . . .

Marschall: I know that Orlando Busino came from Binghamton.

Hart: That’s right, he did. Reg and Brad and Orlando were guys that rarely showed up at our little get-togethers. There was a guy named John Goetchius who lived in Watkins Glen with Jim. And a friend I worked with at General Electric, Joe Bohanicki. These two were gag writers.

Marschall: So these would be occasional get-togethers . . .

Hart: It was once a month. We met at a hotel bar and grille. And that’s what it was, a back-slapping group we called the UCLA, Upstate Cartoonists League of America. And we’d bring some of the more recent work we’d done and show it around. And everybody would look at each other’s work and make suggestions, you know, cheer each other on.

Marschall: What years would this be? Mid-’50s, maybe, when you started to sell?

Hart: Yeah, I was selling then. So it was about 1954 and I had already been selling; 1954 through 1957.

Marschall: The Saturday Evening Post was the top market. How did you crack the Post? And then hit your stride with the other magazines?

Hart: I used to get this magazine called New York Cartoon News, a sort of mimeographed sheet, put out by Don Ulsh. And in it he offered a thing where he’d critique your work for $5. So I sent him a bunch of my gags and he sent me a note back and said that he liked my work and wondered if it would be OK to show it around to some of the other editors. And I said, “Certainly not! I don’t want my work seen by anybody!” NO!—I said “Yes.” And he took it around and on the first shot he sold one to the Saturday Evening Post—it was a spread, a 6-panel cartoon. So I began sending my work to him to agent this stuff for me.

Marschall: That was your first sale to the Post?

Hart: Yeah, and then I followed it up with another one the following week. So I thought I was a hot shot—“Oh, boy, they’re coming fast and furious!” So I told Bobby, “Let’s move up to New York”—we were living in Georgia then—I was fresh out of the service and didn’t know how to do anything except shoot Commies. I’d just got back from Korea. And there weren’t any Commies in Georgia so I said, “I’ve got to get a job doing something. Since I know nothing about anything, but I do know how to draw, I think maybe I’d better take a legitimate stab at this profession.” So I decided to take—I don’t know how long I gave myself, four months or something like that—determined to work night and day, just draw and draw, develop the style that I want. And the sense of humor that I need, to sell. If I haven’t sold at the end of four months, I hit the pavement for a job.

I remember the first week, it took an entire week to think of one gag that was acceptable, that looked like any gag I’d seen in a magazine. That was really hard. And then the next week, I got two or three. By the third week, I was getting two or three a day, and the process was going. So I began to draw, and I drew and drew and drew. And I literally drew all day, every day and into the night and we were just living down on the farm, flopping around drawing. Bobby and I had amassed this incredible amount of money, about $500 that we had saved up from my entire Air Force career. Which, of course, her mother wouldn’t allow us to do anything with, anyway. Near the end of that fourth month, Don Ulsh sold me to the Saturday Evening Post.

OK, when I started selling I figured I was on my way! I don’t know why I did this, but I told Bobby, “Let’s move up to my mother’s house”—you know, from her mother’s house to my mother’s house: equal time. So we did that and I began to sell pretty well. Now we’re living off my mother and I’m confident with the cartoon sales and I figure they’re just going to get more and more and more and I’ll just make a living off it. That wasn’t exactly happening, especially when the summer rolled around; nobody buys any cartoons then, anyway. So, you have zero money for three months! And I said, “Wait a minute! This isn’t working out. I may have to go get me a real job!” So I started out scouting around looking for some jobs. I got a couple of funny, little jobs and then I wound up working for General Electric, which is right down the road here.

Marschall: Doing what?

Hart: A little of everything. I was in their art department. They had some call for cartooning, and since I was around, they began to use cartooning. And I had national reputation; they liked that. I did all kinds of drawing; graphs, charts, whatever the work called for. But I was a pretty good artist by then because I had learned by learning [laughs].

Marschall: In 1958 B.C. made its debut. Were you always trying, when you were drawing for the magazines, to also do a syndicated strip? Did you get tired of gags?

Hart: No, I didn’t. I think my heart was with magazine gags. Around 1956, something like that, this local newspaper picked up Peanuts and I was intrigued by it because there was something in Peanuts that I saw in myself. Schulz and I don’t exactly work alike and don’t have the same sense of humor, but I saw that I could very easily fit into—that kind of thing. Something that made me realize that my sense of humor was marketable in comic strip form, as well as the one-panel. Four panels meant timing, meter, freedom.

Marschall: Little stories . . .

Hart: The timing that’s involved in it, like that. The other part that goes with the story is corny—I didn’t do a lot of caveman gags, but caveman gags were my favorite thing. What caveman gags I ever did, and sent to magazines, I never sold. To this date, I’ve never sold a caveman gag. So, one night I’m swaggering out of the art department at General Electric, the guys are going to work late, and I’m telling them, “You guys can stay here if you want, but I’m going home and create a nationally famous comic strip tonight.” I’m starting out the door and I think it was Bohanicky who says, “Why don’t you do one about cavemen? You can’t sell them anywhere else!” With those words Bohanicky became a minor prophet. My usual routine was to go home, eat supper, and then when the table was cleared, I’d sit at the table and draw magazine gags—draw my batch, to send them in for the week. And I had my little radio there, listening to a Yankee game, and I had a bottle of Kaier’s beer, real cheap, the kind they would deliver to your house.

Marschall: Uh, deliver to your house?

Hart: It was actually good beer. Incredible, good-tasting beer. It was one of these deals. Every week you’d call them up and the guy would come around with a case of beer and put it on your doorstep. Like milk. Anyway, I used to always love to have a beer, listen to the ballgame and draw. That was my modus operandus. I’m sitting there working on the strip and that little voice rang in my ear, “Why don’t you do it about cavemen?” So I thought, “This is great!” This warm, mischievous feeling came over me and I said, “What a good idea! A comic strip about cavemen!”

One of the things that Brant Parker always taught me was that simplicity should be a byword. So I used my famous lettering technique—my sign-painting technique—I lettered the word Simplicity out like a “Think” sign and I put it up on the wall by my drawing board, and in everything thing I did, Simplicity was my byword. And it just fell right into place. What could be simpler than the beginning of man? The total simplicity. And then everything began to really mellow out and I sat there and began to sketch these funny little guys. Eyebrows on sticks...no! [laughs]

Marschall: They hadn’t invented the sticks yet.

Hart: I drew these little guys and I’m having fun drawing them and I’m giving them names and trying to think up a name for the strip—I didn’t think of B.C. right away; that might have been Bobby’s suggestion. I never knew where I got the characters’ triangular shapes, but I started fooling around with that. Anyway, I was having trouble—the cast of characters is no easy thing to do, to have a well-rounded cast of characters that you can play all kinds of situations off—so I didn’t know how to create character traits, form personalities, and then Bobby came in and she said, “What are you trying to do?” And I told her and she said, “Why don’t you just pattern them after your friends? They already have established personalities.” What a great idea! I don’t have to think any up!

So that’s what I did—I patterned the characters after my friends and even named them after them. Like Jack [Caprio]: Clumsy Carp—that was a name we called him when we hung out together as kids. Peter was a guy I worked with at GE and Thor was another guy I worked with at GE whose name was Thornton Kinney. Peter was Pete Reuter, who was a great painter and a concert pianist; a really talented guy.

Wiley was patterned after my brother-in-law—Bobby’s sister’s husband—he lost his leg in the Second World War, so I gave him the peg leg. Wiley’s a really immaculate kind of person, very clean, and always spotless, taking showers all the time—maybe not twice a day, but just a particular man—which isn’t all that funny for a peglegian. So I did the reverse on him—I made Wiley the character hate water, and I turned him into a slob. And then I thought it would be funny to assign a poetic nature to him. My brother-in-law’s whole life is interesting: a man who lost his leg when he was, I guess, 16 or 17 years old, he was very athletic and active. He’s only got like an eight-inch stump, but sports is his whole life! Television sports—baseball, football, he lives for it. So of course I assigned him to be coach of the prehistoric sports teams!

Curls is another childhood friend, Dick Boland, who’s a gagwriter for the Wizard—now he’s a gagwriter for both strips. He’s a very funny guy, he’s a master of great sarcastic retorts. In the strip he’s a Master of Sarcastic Wit; that’s his title. The three of us—me, Jack and him—used to hang out together as kids. What I did was take Jack and Curls, who both have great senses of humor, and I channeled it into gagwriting; I have them write gags for me. They’re both good gagwriters in their own right. They didn’t know anything about it at first; I used to say, “Just get the ideas down on paper, and I’ll take care of the rest of it.” I’d put it into the format and arrange who says what, and pace it.

Interestingly, this very week, Creators Syndicate is kicking off his column, a conservative political-humor column. One of my favorite magazines is the Conservative Chronicle that comes out every week. I sent Curls a gift subscription to this magazine—guess who Curls’s first client is? Rick [Newcombe, president of Creators Syndicate] took it over there, showed them just one column, and they said they’d take it! If it were me, that would be the one I’d be shooting for… and he made it his first!

Marschall: You were turned down by a number of syndicates before the Herald-Tribune picked up B.C. Do remember by whom, or anything about the rejections?

Hart: They were just form rejects.

Marschall: The usual gang—King Features, United, Chicago Tribune maybe?

Hart: I went through about five. One of them was the Associated Press . . .

Marschall: Yeah, they still had a syndicate. I think it ended in 1962.

Hart: They didn’t have strips, just panels.

Marschall: No, they had strips. They had Oaky Doaks, that was still running. And Scorchy Smith . . .

Hart: Hmmm...The guy lied to me! [laughs] I went down to the Associated Press, down to New York to do a Wednesday route [make the rounds of the magazine markets]; I hadn’t seen the guys in a long time. So I went down there to see the cartoonists and go out to eat and do all that stuff.

This reminds me of a general thing: the first time that I ever went down there to take my gags around, I went to lunch with all these guys. These guys are all my heroes—guys who I had been copying all these years.

Marschall: Like?

Hart: Gallagher, Cavalli and Mort Walker?—he wasn’t taking gags around—Frank Ridgeway, and a whole gang of guys like that. Jerry Marcus, Cavalli and whoever you could name. There was this whole, big round table. Does the [Algonquin] Round Table have a big table?

Marschall: Just at knight.

Hart: That may have been where we went for lunch. Anyway, we all went there for lunch. This was the first time that I had ever met any of these guys, but they all knew me because I had been selling. And the subject of the conversation at the table was whether signing “Johnny” with a little heart after it—like I did in those days—was stupid. They were divided in half. Half thought it was the stupidest thing they ever saw. I’m sitting there sinking into my seat; the other guys are saying it was a touch of genius. All I could think to myself was that I’m sitting here with all of my heroes and that they are all arguing over whether I am an idiot or a genius, so signing my name like that couldn’t have been a really, terribly stupid thing to do—suddenly everybody knew me because I signed my name that funny, little way. So anyway, they’re all saying, “No, look, we like you, John,” and I’m thinking, “This is working out great.” They’re arguing over the way I signed my cartoons—which keeps them from critiquing the actual work! So far. So good!

Meanwhile, back to New York City, I went down to do another round with the guys and while I was there I thought I’d run over to AP. I’d sent B.C. to them and they hadn’t returned it like in three months. So I went up to where their office was and—I think the editor’s name was Ed Fleming—I said, “Is this Ed Fleming’s office?” The secretary said it was, I said “Thank you,” and I just walked past her and she said, “Wait a minute, sir! You can’t go in there!” But I walked in and there’s Ed. He had an office with a three-foot square pillar in the middle of the office, and he was standing on a chair putting up a girlie calendar on this pillar! And I walked in and said, “Are you Mr. Fleming?” “Yes?” “I’m Johnny Hart.” “Yes?” “Cartoonist.” “Yes?” I said, “I sent you a comic strip called B.C.” “Yes?” “It’s about cavemen.” “Cavemen, cavemen, ah yes! Cavemen!” And he walks over to this little wooden desk and he starts going through drawers. I couldn’t believe this—he doesn’t just go leaf through a drawer; the drawers are all full, and what he does is he opens one drawer, takes everything out of it and fwump! He slams it all on top of the desk and starts peeling through this stuff. He went through every drawer in that desk and gets to the final drawer, the last drawer, bottom left. He reaches down into it up to his elbows and takes everything out of it and B.C. was on the very bottom! He pulls it out and says, “Ah yes, here it is. I looked at this. No one’s going to buy caveman strips.” So I said, “Why not?” “Because there’s already one out there. There’s Alley Oop.” And I thought about Blondie and all the other family strips—how nobody could ever sell another family strip because there was already one out there? Anyway, right on top of my samples was this other strip, and he says, “Now if you want to see a funny strip...”—instead of saying my strip is lousy—“if you want to see a funny strip, here’s one right here.” This is one that is right on top of the bottom one in his bottom drawer! Bottom drawer! But this one is funny! So I look at it and it’s a John Gallagher strip.

Marschall: Really?

Hart: And it really was terrific. It was about a tramp and a little robotic kind of guy that he made out of tin cans at the dump and he’s got this little guy following him around. I agreed with him and said, “This is a funny strip.” Then—the one thing that got lost there in the conversation was that he said, “Besides, we don’t buy comic strips anyway, we do panels.” He tells me that they don’t buy comic strips and I’ll tell you why this is so important. Because you tell me that they had comic strips and the whole story hinges on that line—that’s the reason that B.C. is around today. Because of that line.

I was in a funk, a deep state of depression, when I left that office. At that time we looked up to editors. When a cartoon editor said something to you, that meant that’s the way it was. So he said that nobody would buy cavemen; I went out of there, and obviously the strip wasn’t funny because the one on top of mine was Gallagher’s. The top one in the first drawer must have been a real winner! It should be on the bottom by now though. There’s probably one like it, that’s out there.

When I went out of there and my attitude was To Heck With It because I was going to go over and meet the guys for dinner. I went downstairs and walked out in front of Rockefeller Center, and I walked down to the street corner and waited for the street light to change. I had B.C. in this little long thin folder and I was just standing there feeling really, really depressed and I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw this trash basket that says Keep New York Clean. And I stood there and I pulled the thing out from under my arm and I slammed it on the edge of the basket and was just about to shove it into the basket when this voice in my ear—the playback, you know?—said, “Besides, we don’t buy comic strips anyway.” That’s what saved me. I picked the thing back up and slid it under my arm and said, “He doesn’t buy comic strips. How does he know what’s a good strip or a bad one? He deals with panels!

So I put it back under my arm and went into the lobby of the RCA building and went into a telephone booth and looked up syndicates and found the New York Herald-Tribune Syndicate. It was nearby, so I went over there and went up into the office and asked to see the cartoon editor and the receptionist said, “We don’t have one right now, we just hired one and he comes in next Monday. I looked over and there’s this empty desk with nothing on it but a telephone. So I said, “Do you have a syndicate directory?” She looks like she could have been the prototype for the Fat Broad, and asks, “So what do you want that for?” I told her that I just wanted to look something up. “Could I use that phone over there?” So I took the syndicate directory and looked up...I can’t remember, McNaught Syndicate or something, it was practically across the street, and thought I would run over there with this thing. I thanked her—I can imagine what she’s thinking—I come in there, sit down at the new editor’s desk, use the phone, call another syndicate, and leave!

So I went over to McNaught and asked to see the cartoon editor and laid B.C. on his desk, told him who I was. He knew me, knew my work, was very congenial and said, “Thank you.” I said, “You’re not going to look at it now?” “No, I’ll look at it later and get back to you.” I said, “I don’t think so,” and picked it up. I was in my rude mode. I think I’d had enough of Ed Fleming and the bottom drawer, and my almost throwing it in the waste basket and all that stuff. I don’t do any of that rude stuff, but I did it then for expediency. I wanted to find another syndicate now and go over there. So I just walked out. I left him sitting there just looking at me; this guy had one of the most intimidating kinds of office; you had to walk 80 yards to leave. So I did my John Wayne [impression] going out of there, swaggered on out, left the door open so he’d have to...no, I didn’t do that.

But I got on a train and came home. Those days when we had more trains...my favorite part always was riding the train. I holed up in the club car and came home. The next day I got up and said, “Where am I going to send this sucker now?” I put it back in an envelope, thought about how rude I was and thought I at least owed it to New York Herald-Tribune. What a rude bastard I had been. So I addressed it and sent it off and when Harry Welker came in that Monday morning to start his new job, there was this same empty desk with the telephone and one envelope—with B.C. in it. Being a diligent employee, he said, “Hmmm, this one looks pretty good!”—No, he said later he looked at it and he knew my work, he had seen it in magazines; because I was an established cartoonist, they weren’t worried about some fly-by-night kind of one-time thing. So they’ve got this young, very nice, personable guy named Sylvan Barnett, he’s real young as far as syndicate directors go. Harry goes in and says “What do you think?” So the guy writes me a note and says come on down and have lunch with us. I went to New York and had lunch with them and he hands me this ominous brown envelope. He says, “Take this home with you, get yourself a lawyer, read everything and make sure everything is as you like it. Call us or send it back.” Now, this isn’t the way things are done nowadays. I didn’t know a lawyer; I had a friend whose brother was a lawyer.

But I just showed it to my dad, the fireman. “So, what do you think, Dad? Think it will burn?” [laughs] No, I didn’t say that. Dad said, “Looks fine to me!” I said, “All right.” I did show it to this guy’s brother and he said it looked fine to him. It really was a good contract. Excellent. Everything was totally equitable down the line, no sneakiness, no shadiness, it was fair, except for ownership. I didn’t know that I could have that.

Marschall: Not many did in those days.

Hart: There were four or five musketeers there—myself and Mell Lazarus, Al Jaffee, Arnie Roth, and...David Gantz, did Don Q?

Marschall: Dudley D back then.

Hart: Dudley D, yeah, so that was their stable of guys.

Marschall: And some old-timers. You had Harry Haenigsen’s two strips, Penny and Our Bill. Mr. And Mrs. was still running, the old Clare Briggs strip; Kin Platt was drawing it when B.C. started. You overlapped. It was a very interesting section—these new, hip strips and these old, moldy leftovers, all in the same section. And Peanuts ran in the Trib.

Hart: That’s what I was remembering, because all of us were brand new, Arnie and all, we were just starting. Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth went down with their features, in my estimation, because of syndicate meddling. Al had a strip called Tall Tales. It’s a thing that syndicates do, and they may be right but they’ll never prove it by me, is when they say that you have to have an established, recognizable character with a name. Now Al’s was a pantomime strip that didn’t have established characters. They tried to make Al change and they did the same thing to Arnie with Poor Arnold’s Almanac. I thought Jaffee was great. You know, the hardest thing in the world is to do is a pantomime strip, sustain it, keep it up. Jaffee did it very well. Anyway, once they started meddling, they started losing papers.

Marschall: As you’re pointing out, you were all, maybe not avant garde, but you were all doing fresh stuff, probably more than any of the big syndicates’ strips at that time. Did Harry Welker or Sylvan Barnettt have their heads on right or was it that they knew their home paper was really dying, and they were just really desperate for new features, new blood?

Hart: That’s why Harry was hired, to beef up their comic pages. That’s what he told me. I think the whole paper [the Herald-Tribune] was on the ropes. I just knew that I was getting a chance at something that I had always wanted to do. I knew nothing about New York newspapers; having heard later, it was a home for alcoholics, the old New York Herald-Tribune. The first thing that we did when we got there was, we’d all go piling downstairs to Blake’s. Walt Kelly was always hanging around down there at the bar. Sometimes I’d join in with him, not every night, but after they’d been there all day they’d start singing harmony and I’d join in with him, and it would be a lot of fun.

Marschall: That used to come with the territory, didn’t it, drinking and cartooning in the old days?

Hart: We used to fall into it because everybody loved to do that. Sit around all afternoon, be one of the guys. Listen, it was cool with me. I was a young dude, this was all new with me, my big chance, hanging out with these guys, drinking booze, singing songs.

Marschall: What kind of a list did you have with the Trib? Did they sell it well?

Hart: They started with 30 newspapers. Pretty good ones. In those days that was pretty reputable. Because they called me up and said you’ve got 30 newspapers now, you can quit the day job. No, they started with the 30 and it was about six months later that they started the Sunday; they waited to see what would happen.

Marschall: Before we leave your pre-syndicate days, I’d like to ask about your Christian commitment. Did that start early?

Hart: My mom and dad didn’t go to church except on Christmas and Easter but they made sure that I went to Sunday School. At least they started me off in that direction, so I used to go to Sunday School when I was a kid—and didn’t learn anything there, either! [laughs] I don’t know where my mind has been all of my life. Someday I’m going to find it. And when I do, I know I’m going to be disappointed. Unquote, Jackie Leonard.

I was always totally intrigued and fascinated by Bible stories but never really got into them and never really totally understood what it was totally about, but my mother and father were good people and so was I. I tried to get serious about going to church, being a good Christian. But I never got into the Bible . . .

Marschall: What church was it? What denomination?

Hart: It was Methodist. Recently when we moved out here, see—everything comes back now—it was orchestrated by God. He moved us out here, to get us away from the kind of life that we were leading—because we were just going along with the happy times, you gotta party, can’t have any fun unless you drink, that kind of thing. And you were just miserable all your life and didn’t realize it. Trying to get rid of all that misery in the obvious ways that people do: “Hey, it’s the Super Bowl this weekend! Now we’re really going to have fun!” “What’s next week?” “I don’t know! What are we going to do?” “Shoot up!” It’s a weird life and people are missing it. But I thank God that He directed me in this direction. When we came out here to live where we are living, we lost communication with the world, sort of, television-wise.

Marschall: You moved from where to…?

Hart: We moved from Endicott and moved 30 miles up. Out in the country, in the middle of the woods.

Marschall: And when was this?

Hart: This was in 1977. Just shortly after that, a friend of mine—my carpenter who used to work for me in Endicott—came out here to work for me here. Some guys came by his home in Endicott and asked if they could set up a satellite dish in the vacant lot next door so they could set up a tent and have people come by and visit it so they could sell satellite systems, which were fairly new then. So he asked me if I would like to see one. Bobby and I went in and bought a system. So those guys came out here and looked at the 150 acres. We had to run a line like 1,500 feet from the house and bury it underground, all this complicated stuff, and these guys had never installed anything like this before. So they came out here and they began to live with us, staying at the studio at night; it was in the winter.

These guys were born-again Christians, this guy and his father. And they’re all over the studio and all over the house, we’ve got several sets in each place, and they’re in here setting up and testing out all these things, and they’re using PTL [a Christian television network] as a test pattern. And all day long it was preaching and preaching and all this stuff. I said, “What is this? Can’t you guys tune in some other station?” And they said, “Oh, we’re sorry!” I said, “Oh, that’s OK.” And then I began to see Kenneth Copeland come on and I’d drop my pen and start watching, and suddenly I’m having favorite preachers. So when those guys left, this was my favorite channel! I said, “I wonder what made them come in here and do that?” Like I didn’t know! This whole thing was orchestrated by God.

Marschall: Another Carpenter at work!

Hart: Yeah. Thank you for that one. I don’t know, but I kinda got hooked. Bobby was oblivious to all this, and I found myself, when she wasn’t around, I’d cut over to that other channel and watch somebody preach. I was really getting hooked on it and one day I asked Bobby, “Do you feel like going over to that little church over in town?” And she says, “No, not necessarily.” So I prayed that she would, that God would touch her with this, so it wouldn’t be me and not her. One Sunday morning she woke up early and said, “Want to go to church?” I said “Yeah!” We hopped out of bed and went over to this little church and when we went in there, these are all people that we’ve known, because we live around here. It was a real happy little church. We started going there and now we teach Sunday School and we’re members and do all that good stuff. We created a library in the church, our whole house had become a Christian book library, almost. That’s all we do is buy books and tapes and things for the children over there. It’s a fun life where we’re going.

Marschall: This is the Presbyterian church?

Hart: Yeah. “Why the Presbyterian church?” “It’s the only church in town.”

Marschall: Is it?

Hart: Yeah. There is actually, just down the road here, a Baptist church and a Methodist church, but we didn’t get that far. What we originally set out to do was go to a different church each week and listen to the preaching. I wish we had done that, but somehow we got over here with all these people, these lovely people . . .

Marschall: But that’s where God wants you. When did you start putting Christian or Bible-based spiritual themes in the strip?

Hart: It’s been quite a few years, I think, longer than I thought. Maybe 1985 or ’86 I can’t remember. We put the satellite dishes in in ’84. It started out like when Christmas would roll around—if a holiday comes up, I do something about the holiday. I’ve been doing that for the life of the strip. However when the religious holidays come up, some people really tick me off; like I did a Good Friday strip about Jesus. It’s Good Friday, so I do something about who the day is about and...well, the Los Angeles Times wouldn’t run it. I found out from somebody.

Marschall: They dropped it? Did they run an explanation? Run an old strip?

Hart: I don’t know how that worked. I think they did it this year again. I called up Rick [Newcombe] one day and said, “Take the strip away from them!”

But he was saved by the bell—there was a new managing editor or something who was just hired by the L. A. Times, and Rick wanted to see what was going on; he’d check it out and and give him a chance, or something.

Marschall: I’m interested in reactions from both ends. Have you gotten any other grief or complaints or letters or drops . . .

Hart: Not any drops that I know of. But I’m like the Pied Piper of the Woodwork-Christians. They’re coming out of the woodwork, and they’re saying, “Way to go!”

Marschall: So, you’re getting more positive reactions?

Hart: Oh, yeah! Probably 99 percent. A handful of crank people say, “I see what you’re doing. You’re trying to ruin the scientists with your evolution ideas”—and one of them said, “Keep your God out of my face.” These are the guys that have a lot of anger and hatred, who have turned away from God big time. [laughs]

There was always this one guy, a letter-writer, who I wanted to reach, to get him to realize what it’s all about. “Oh my gosh, this is it! That’s what it’s about!” This guy who was so angry and offended and irate about me putting my religious ideas in front of his face. And I’m working, working, and I have a little folder on the side and thinking that one of these days I’m going to get the right thing and I’m going to write back to him and surprise the hell out of him and hit him with this incontrovertible truth! So I pull out his folder one day...and he didn’t have any address on his letter! I’d been working on this for three years and I didn’t know where the guy is! I’ve got a lot of material for him if he surfaces. Maybe I’ll tick him off again.

Marschall: Maybe he’ll read this interview or maybe you’ll just pray it through and save a stamp in the process.

Hart: There you go. “God, just take this to that guy.”

Marschall: Not everyone who has had a conversion can name the moment; sometimes it’s gradual, it’s not all Saul on the road to Damascus. I take it that that wasn’t the way with you? It was a gradual conviction?

Hart: Yeah, yeah—too subtle.

Marschall: Also, many Christians have had crises or problems that have come to a head that have been solved by their conversion. Did that happen with you? Were you going through anything personal or creative that was solved by . . .

Hart: No, that’s my problem. It’s really a problem. Why don’t I get any of those feelings that I can put my finger on? All I’m aware of are subtle realizations where I can say, now I know what that was, or how I came out of that, but there was no dramatic lifting out of something. I look back at things like, why did I get the measles when I was 47 for no reason, when my liver was about gone and the only thing that could possibly rejuvenate a liver is a disease like that in which the liver has to totally reconstruct itself, and it did.

Marschall: Really?

Hart: Like the time I went to New York—one of those times I went down to the city, I stepped out through a crowd of people because I wondered why they were all standing on the sidewalk. They were at a bus stop. The intersection was crowded, I couldn’t get through, and I was in a hurry. I went down the line and all these people were still standing there. I said, “Why these huge crowds?” So I stepped out into the street but somebody grabbed me by the back of the neck and yanked me back onto the curb—pulled me out of my shoes, just about. And as I went back onto the curb and slammed into a couple of people standing there, I just saw these bus windows strobing by my face about a foot and a half from my face. I would have been smeared all the way down Times Square. And I turned around to thank the person...but there wasn’t anybody looking at me; everybody was just starting to move.

That has always puzzled me. Who’s the guy that did that? Why didn’t he say something? I turned to thank someone who had just saved my life. Now I look back and I know it was an angel. We know now about angels being here and doing these supernatural things. Face it, who in New York would care if I got all smeared down the streets of Times Square?

Marschall: It would be the opposite! Someone would have pushed you!

Hart: [laughs] And it was sure somebody strong because I had lurched forward to step out into the street, and if I had made it, I would have been pasted on the front of that bus. Those people stand there with their feet hanging over the edge so when that bus comes it practically brushes their clothes. Boy, that scared me! Now I can look back and say, “Ah, I know what that was!”

Marschall: Do you think you were saved in that, and maybe a lot of other instances, saved for something?

Hart: Well, I would assume. Otherwise, let me go. [laughs]

Marschall: When you think about things like that, do you see more of a purpose to your life, do you want to add more of an edge to some of the messages you can make?

Hart: Yeah, there is a purpose here. I do think that. I’m not very good at picking up on where God is leading me. But the purpose is the hot dog on the end of the stick. It’s there. For a human being to be oblivious to any purpose for his existence—is pathetic beyond reason.

Marschall: You yield yourself to Him.

Hart: Yeah, really.

Marschall: I think I’ve never seen you do this—have you ever done any message strips in Wizard? It’s not the vehicle for it, is it?

Hart: It could be. I’ve done a little, just touched on it.

Marschall: I’ve been asking you about letters you got, most of them are favorable to what I call message strips. What are your ideas about comics as a medium not just for humor? Are you happy with the strips that you’ve done in that way—can you see yourself doing comic books and maybe longer stories with religious messages? Do you think comics are a good medium for making those kinds of statements?

Hart: I think so. It reaches a good audience, the kids. You have the gimmick that attracts an audience and you can either… you’re talking about going for broke, putting out that message in comic books? Yeah, this is one of those ideas that I’ve been entertaining...like a comic book or even maybe a children’s book. B.C. is a comic character but he doesn’t have to be on a comic page or a comic book. He could be in a cute, little funny children’s book.

Marschall: Text and art rather than panels or balloons, you mean?

Hart: Text and art, and balloons, a combination of all three. We deal with format restrictions. Things like, “Hey! What is Larson doing there, anyway? He’s using a balloon and caption! You can’t do that, you’re breaking the format rules!” The Format Police would show up at the door...Anyway, we do that: we place all these restrictions on ourselves, we’re frozen into all these things, ways to do things, we’ve superimposed them on ourselves.

Even in little ways, like in cartooning, I’m always amazed. For a long time I always drew eyes a certain way. I said, “Well, what are my characters going to have? Round eyes or those little eyelid type eyes? Little slits, like Cavalli used to do.” But you can’t have both. I’m drawing the strip for about 30 years and I said “Why can’t we have both?” In this panel he can have his eyes half-closed and in this panel he can them open wide. People might say the character is losing his identity. It’s like drawing Barney Google with slit eyes. We have all these restrictive things that go through our minds, about life in general. “Hey, you can’t eat that with a fork!” Things like that. Rule paranoia. Give a man enough freedom and he’ll invent enough rules to choke himself. It’s in our genes. We even wear tight jeans (case in point).

Marschall: [laughs] Self-restricted. You’re not about to get an editor coming down on you...

Hart: No, but you feel like you’re violating some rule. So these are all things that cause you stress, a little bit of stress in your life, along with all the other stressful things. Then suddenly you say, “Wait a minute! I can do anything! I can be innovative!”

Marschall: When you have those little debates with yourself, is it from behind you, like a voice over your shoulder about tradition, or does it come from in front of you, on the drawing board? Are you wedded to the characters doing things a certain way because the characters are that way or because the business is that way?

Hart: It comes from both sources because the business is sort of that way. You never see Dagwood with his hair fluffed up. It’s like when you create a character for recognizability, it’s like a rubber-stamp thing, and the way you’ve created him, designed him, is the way he should always look. I notice that Dagwood does were shorts now, jeans, things like that. It looks a little weird, but it’s still Dagwood.

Marschall: I even saw him shopping for shirts that didn’t have that one big button in the middle. Now, you made a fairly distinctive change in B.C.’s appearance once, from being a tubby, bowling-pin character to being slimmer. That was conscious, wasn’t it? You felt restrictions on the way he moved, the way he looked?(To view the images below, click on the thumbnails.)

Hart: Yes. There was a time when I looked at him and said, “Wait a minute!” There were certain things that he couldn’t do because of this silly shape that I put on him. He was a huge triangle, with a huge bottom and little short legs. His legs wouldn’t bend; they didn’t have knees—and if they did bend, where would his body go? So I began to, probably gradually so I wouldn’t violate the format, began to elongate his legs and slim down his body a little bit and at one point he reached the state where he had real long legs and a thin body.

I think I used to see a great deal of humor in the posturing and poses of Daffy Duck. Bent over with the rear end, Groucho Marx look, with the head bent forward. I thought my characters should take on that kind of a look. Wile E. Coyote. I saw a lot more humor in the trimmer characters with the funny, little body. I began to work toward that. Then one thing I noticed, I don’t know how long I had been doing this, these guys hardly had any suits on any more. The suits had been reduced down to a longer body with this little black trim on the bottom. It’s like I’d never noticed it before—I’d been doing it gradually—the suits are getting smaller and smaller, and suddenly one day I said, “Wait! What is this?” Originally, I had created him a pretty, thick suit for the blacks, for the look of it, so you wouldn’t have all just lines on the paper—you would have spot blacks, and that added a nice look to the art because you had big, solid black shapes that you could offset with Bendays [mechanical toned shading].

Marschall: Could you always translate what you saw in your mind’s eye to paper?

Hart: In Georgia when I was first starting out I knew what I wanted to put down on paper in my mind, and I could see the look of it, but it still wouldn’t come out of the hand. There was still a gap there somewhere. I kept trying and trying, working and working, and it just wouldn’t happen. I was getting really, really frustrated this one night. I used to sit in this living room with a card table. I had a little bottle of ink and paper and I’m doing my stuff and I’m getting more and more frustrated. I made some kind of move and tipped the ink over and spilled it all over the drawings that I had done. And that did it. I sat there for a minute and then I just flipped the table and kicked the chair and Bobby comes running in, ink all over the floor and says, “What’s wrong?” And I was ranting and raving about something, swearing, I guess, and for some reason, I don’t know where it came from—a Word of Knowledge, maybe—I said, “You mark my words. Before I’m 27 I’m going to have a nationally syndicated comic strip.”

That came to pass, as they say. Later Bobby said, “You remember the night you threw that fit? Do you remember what you said?” “No.” This was on the eve of my 27th birthday and we were looking at B.C. in living black and white in the New York Herald-Tribune.

Marschall: It had just come out?

Hart: That was the first night, the first strip.

Marschall: Its debut was on your birthday?

Hart: On the night before. So it came to pass before I was 27 years of age—talk about a deadline! I forget—I wrote it somewhere—to my knowledge that’s the last time I preempted a deadline [laughs]. I was oblivious to the words but Bobby didn’t forget because I think I scared her back in Georgia. Kicked things all over. This was back in 1952; we were just married.

Marschall: What were you, 21 or 22, something like that?

Hart: Maybe. I was born in 1931—yeah, I was 21. And why that came out, because I didn’t even know, I wasn’t sure I said the word “syndicate” because I didn’t think I knew what a syndicate was. But that’s what she told me I’d said. I just got goose pimples, and said “Really?” “That’s what you said.”

Marschall: Things are ordered. We haven’t talked much about Wizard of Id. When did you come up with that idea? Did you always have in mind to collaborate with Brant?

Hart: No, as a matter of fact I had Jack [Caprio] slated to do that, but for whatever reason he didn’t feel that he was up to it or didn’t want to do it.

Marschall: You had the idea earlier?

Hart: Well, let’s see, 1958 [B.C.’s debut] to ’64 [The Wizard’s debut]… I probably had the idea in 1960 because I shelved it for four years and I felt really unenthusiastic about it and suddenly the light bulb came on and I said, “Brant!” Actually, Brant had been around since the inception of the Wizard.

One night we were all down at my house and I laid it on these guys—Jack and Brant and Curls. And I said I have this idea and I have the drawings—the King is going to look like a playing card; that’s the way he started out. And the Jester is going to be a Jester and everybody is going to look like what they are. I laid it all out for them and we got like guys do when you’ve got something new—we had this nice session going, ideas were flying around, we were having fun, and then we began to pursue it. Somewhere I have a thick package full of preprinted title lines, Wizard by Hart and Caprio, laying around here.

Everything was ready to go and it just kind of fizzled. I just put in on the shelf and went about my business. Then about four years later I said, “I’ve really got to do this thing,” that’s when I thought about Brant. So I called him and said, “If I write this thing, would you draw it?” And he said, “I’d love to.” “OK—we’re on!” So we made this arrangement to meet in this hotel room—at that time Brant was in Virginia—a sleazy, fleabag hotel in New York City. I had all of the paper and the gags for about 24 strips and we had our bottles of ink. It was this terrible hotel room but it was about a block away from the Herald-Tribune, around the corner from it. We just holed up there for several days and we drew 24 Wizards. He penciled some and I penciled some and I’d ink some of his and he’d ink some of mine. We just went back and forth doing all this stuff and we put together the initial four weeks of the Wizard of Id, and as we did them we taped them up on the walls of the hotel room. The beds that we had were like these old bunks that they used to have in the barracks in World War II.

At some point we had painted the toilet to look like a character. The lid was a big nose, with India ink around the edge of it, and big eyes on the back of the tank. It had a mustache and a bow tie and I think Brant even drew out a part of a body coming out across the tiles on the floor. It was really strange. We had meals sent up. It was beginning to look like a dump up there. We’d get it cleaned up somewhat but we still had some beer bottles laying around on the floor...we were having the time of our lives. When we finally taped the last one up on the wall, I called over to the syndicate and asked them if they wanted to see a new comic strip. “Really? Sure! Bring it in.” “Can’t do that.” “Why not?” “Because they’re taped all over the walls.” Twenty minutes later they came over. Brant and I were running around kicking beer bottles under the beds, I’m in there shaving and Brant is in his shorts, he’s not even dressed, and here are these three syndicate guys in their black suits, white shirts, black ties—they looked like Mafia—and they come into the room shaking hands and I come out in my shorts with lather all over my face. I go over and kick another beer bottle under the bed. It’s called Wizard of Id; I say, we tell them about the lead characters. And they start walking around the walls like they’re in a museum, with their hands behind their backs, in this flea-bag with masking tape all over the walls. They’re going “hm, hm” like art connoisseurs.

Every so often they kick a bottle under the bed and Brant and I are just sitting there on the bunks and watching them go around the room—a few chuckles here and there, yeah. When they were all done, two of them turned around and the other one sat down on the bed and said, “Well, we think you guys are disgusting, but the strip is great.” So, we all shook hands and he said, “We’ll take it.” And that was the whole trick.

Marschall: It came out in 1964?

Hart: Yeah, in November 1964.

Marschall: Which strip has the bigger list today?

Hart: I don’t know. They’re almost about the same, but I think the Wizard has more. It picked up several papers, probably because of Gary Larson quitting, maybe eight or 10 new papers.

Marschall: Was that the oddest contract you had, the Wizard sale?

Hart: Well, once, Dick Sherry [president of Field Newspaper Syndicate] went down to Fort Lauderdale—I was renting a house there to be close to Yankee spring training—and stayed and stayed, trying to get me to sign a contract extension. Finally he brought out two baseballs with lettering on them: “John Hart hereby agrees to extend the terms for five years…” or whatever.

Marschall: You signed the baseballs? Were they actual contracts?

Hart: Yep I signed them and he went home. I hold the distinction of being the only cartoonist in history, perhaps, who signed a baseball contract.

Marschall: How does the collaboration on Wizard work? You write it or you run the shop? Jack Caprio writes for you, Dick Boland still writes?

Hart: I be the head editor. That’s sort of the role I keep seeing myself in more than the creative. Essentially it’s this: I write and draw B.C. and I write the Wizard and Brant draws it. That’s what everybody sees, essentially. Al Capp told me once, “Nobody wants to know that you don’t do it all yourself.” I don’t necessarily agree. That may say more about Al Capp than it does about...is there an echo in here?

Now, behind the scenes, Jack writes for both strips; well, all three guys write for both strips. At one time Jack wrote for both strips, Curls wrote for just the Wizard, and recently I brought in Cavalli. Cavalli was writing for B.C. and I’m being the editing guy making all this stuff work. I just recently added the Wizard to Cavalli. So now all three write for both. I have lots of good material coming in now. I do pretty much all of the B.C. Sundays myself.

Marschall: Does Brant contribute to the ideas?

Hart: No.

Marschall: Now it’s a geography thing, but when he lived closer was there anything like that?

Hart: No, he meddles. Every so often Brant has to meddle. I know what he’s doing. He has periods when he feels out of the creative loop so he starts toying with punch lines or dialogue. And he’ll throw it at me and we’ll snowball on the phone and we’ll have fun.

Probably nine times out of ten when he calls up for something like that, it really wasn’t thought out as well as it should have been. When we get done, we usually turn it into a classic because we’ll spend 20 to 30 minutes on it. Suddenly we’re both laughing like hell and the gag is nothing like before—it’s a totally different gag. And we have a great time doing it.

Brant does contribute in that way. When we put the characters together, Brant has great suggestions and he has this insight about how the characters should work on a page and he’ll say, “Well, what if you had them do this?” And it always leads down a better road. So Brant does contribute, but he won’t write gags or submit them or anything like that.

Marschall: What are the mechanics? Do you fax him scripts or roughs?

Hart: I just put our various gags on 3-by-5 cards and Cavalli writes them out on legal pads, prints them in cartoon printing. Then I pick out a week—two of Jack’s, two of Dick’s and two of Cavalli’s and just lay them out in the copy machine, in the sequence that I want them to appear. Then I date them and stick them in the fax machine and send them to Brant.

Marschall: The artwork is all his own?

Hart: All his own. Brant has idiosyncrasies about placement of things in panels—like the king’s throne always has to be facing left.

One time I confronted him and told him he’d affected the gag because of this. And he says, “Well, I just can’t bring myself to . . .” and he starts talking to me about elements. “What? Element?” And he says, “Well that panel already has four elements and you can’t have more than three elements in a panel.” I said, “What’s an element, Brant?” I started doing a Bob Newhart. And he says “It’s got two people and a balloon” “Is the balloon an element, too?” And he says, “Yeah, and the people are elements, too.” “Well, what else is in the panel?” And he says, “There’s a chair and a dog.” “Those aren’t elements?” And he says, “No, not really.” Anyway, it was something like that. We’re going through this conversation—“Let me get this straight. A dog is not an element but a balloon is?” We’re going through this and then it got hilarious.

Marschall: How about the date? Is the date of the strip an element?

Hart: [laughs] I said, “What are the elements for? Is it balance or what?” He says, “No, I think if you have too many elements . . .” I said, “Is this what they teach in art school? Where’d you get it from? Who uses that?” He says, “Nobody.” I said “You thought this up yourself, you know, it stands to reason...Brant, I think it’s a great idea.” Because if you find Brant doing something really stupid and you hang around him long enough, he’ll prove that he’s right. He did something one time, he changed the size of his strip so that his lines would look better. I said, “Nah, that can’t happen,” because he made it something like three-quarters of an inch smaller—less wide.

Marschall: That’s all?

Hart: Then I began to figure out ratios and went through all this stuff. I tried to reason with him: “You see, Brant, that doesn’t work. I’m giving him all this sure mathematic logic and all this stuff. Then we’re sitting around a day later and I’m thinking about it and if you did do that, it would make your lines thicker. I figured that he was right. And he was!

Marschall: Universal Press gives their cartoonists a vacation.

Hart: You mean “House of the Hiatus.” They ought to put that on their letterhead.

Marschall: What do you think of Bill Watterson’s work and the claims that he staked against licensing and merchandising characters? Evidently you don’t agree with that.

Hart: I do in a sense. I look at it in a couple of ways. First, I think you’re going for the bucks, “Let’s get all the bucks!” I admire his restraint, but I don’t understand it. If my strip was as popular as his, everyone was clamoring for it, couldn’t wait to pay money to get it, I would go ahead with the merchandising. I don’t do a lot of merchandising because people do a lot of dumb merchandising on my stuff and some of it doesn’t even look like my stuff, the shape of it, and I don’t want to get involved where I have to do all the work for them.