Johnny Hart + comic artist, Johnny Hart, the wildly successful comic-strip artist of "B.C." and "The Wizard of Id" has died at his drawing board at 76. (We should add the tiny footnote that Hart was a three-time judge of the MRC’s "Best of Notable Quotables" in the mid-1990s.) In his Monday obituary in the Washington Post, Adam Bernstein noted Hart’s success, but focused like a laser beam on how Hart’s religion-themed strips were sometimes censored by the Post and other newspapers with "insensitive and at times offensive themes."


The Post story did not note that often liberal editors perceived the mere expression of Hart's Christianity as offensive, that somehow religion didn't belong in cartoons, even as liberal newspapers used Christian themes against Christians. In 1996, we noted how Hart's strips were pulled for "religious overtones," and how that compared to other images of Christianity in those papers:

During this year's Lenten season, when Christians examine their faith and commitment to God, the Los Angeles Times decided to show its own hostility to religion. In the March 28 issue the paper ran an editorial cartoon with the image of Bob Dole crucified. The crown of thorns on his forehead read "Christian Coalition."
Three days later, the paper spiked Johnny Hart's Palm Sunday B.C. comic strip, featuring the character Wiley writing a poem honoring Christ's death for man's sins. Los Angeles Times spokeswoman Ariel Remler told The Washington Times that "lately he's [Hart] been running cartoons with religious overtones." Then in an April 2 statement quoted in The Washington Times, Remler announced that the paper would spike the strip on all three days of the Easter weekend. After receiving hundreds of protest calls, the paper reversed itself, announcing it would run the Friday and Saturday strips.
Two years ago, the Times played a similar game, spiking Hart's "inappropriate" Easter Sunday strip with a resurrection theme, but then ran in June a series of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strips featuring John Boswell's controversial claim that the Catholic Church sanctioned same-sex marriages in the middle ages.
Bernstein's obituary was not harsh, but it did dwell on Hart's most controversial comic strips. The primary question for the Post and their obituary editors would be: why be tougher on a comic-strip artist than you were on an American communist leader/supposed "civil rights activist"? Or a "charming and avuncular" East German communist spymaster? Or the communist spy who was allegedly "the best reporter in the Vietnamese press corps"?



Read more: newsbusters