Johnny Hart, RIP

Even at 47 I still read the comics first, every day. (In fact that and the obituaries is the only reason I care about getting a daily paper.)
One thing I can say for the Indianapolis Star is that when it absorbed the Indianapolis News in 1999, it kept ALL of the comics from both newspapers. Otherwise we would not still have Johnny Hart’s B.C.
I don’t care one way or the other if a comic strip is evangelical; what I care about is that it’s funny, or it tells a story, or both. (In most cases, the ones that aren’t are the ones that are intentionally assholish, for instance, “Non Sequiter”, “Candorville”, “Pearls Before Swine”, and on Gerry Trudeau’s Nixon flashback days, “Doonesbury”. And thank God we finally got rid of “Boondocks”, which was nothing but reverse racism for the sake of reverse racism.) Hart was good at poking fun at the religiously-intolerant, godless Left with the sharpened pen of his strong but gentle Christian faith. And for this he was reviled by his targets.
The first thing I thought when I read Michelle Malkin’s obit today was how the strip would continue. Thankfully, it appears that he had support from his family and they will carry on his work.
When you look at the comics today — increasingly being taken over by political rhetoric, and that includes “Mallard Fillmore” and “Prickly City”, two of my favorites — you’ll pardon this Jewish boy celebrating the fact that one cartoonist consistently held the contrary but equally controversial view that faith in something larger than yourself overrode partisan political squabbles, and could be used as a tool to make even people of different confessions stop and think for a moment about their spiritual side.
Requiescat in pace, Johnny Hart.