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I first noticed it when I was a kid.  Growing up a fan of the comic page, my family owned some bound book collections of comics like Doonesbury and Garfield and B.C. I rather liked the old B.C. comics by Johnny Hart, actually.  In spite of the fact that characters had names like The Fat Broad and The Cute Chick, there was the ever amusing Grog (a Neanderthal in a caveman’s world) and The Apteryx, who always introduced himself as “a wingless bird with hairy feathers”.

But starting around 1984 the strip I saw in my newspaper started to change.  The comic that I’d always loved started to get strangely religious.  Hart, it seems, had experienced a religious conversion or renewal of some sort and suddenly it was all about the God.

I hadn’t thought much about old B.C. until the other day when I noticed that as series go, B.C. (which Matt has pointed out is ironically the ONLY comic strip to specifically say that the actions in the storyline happen “Before Christ”) is not alone.  Periodically there are characters and series that kids love that one day suddenly become evangelical.  Sometimes as a separate series.  Sometimes as part of the whole.  B.C., it seems, was just part of a trend.

Now I totally understand and am fine with a series being Christian.  My focus here is more on those characters that establish themselves as beloved and secular and then suddenly pull a religious conversion on their readers without much warning.  I find this whole idea fascinating.  How many characters have engaged in such a switch?  Two immediate examples come to mind.

Meet Christian Archie

Archie comics rock.  This is proven by any cursory trip to ComicCon.  Find the Archie section of the conference floor and you’ll be immediately amazed by the hoards of Archie fans, young and old, that congregate there.  At some point in the 21st century Archie was allowed to be cool.

However, there was an interesting moment in time when Archie and friends got super Christian, super fast.  Back in the mid-1970s Archie comics staffer Al Hartley managed to do what today would be impossible.  He convinced his boss John Goldwater to negotiate a deal with Spire Christian Comics.  Spire would get to use the licensed Archie characters for specifically Christian comic books and the Archie name would get a leg up in the whole family friendly section of the world.  So eighteen such Archie comics were created.

Vanity Fair covered Archie back in 2006 and discussed this phenomenon.  The comics were never intended to circulate in the secular market, but somehow they did.  For a full history of the comics themselves you can read Kliph Nesteroff’s A History of Christian Archie Comics, which gives a thorough rundown of what happened.  Comics Alliance also worked up

In the late 1960s, Muppets creator Jim Henson collaborated with comic strip artist Johnny Hart (the creator of B.C. and The Wizard of Id)–planning TV show based on The Wizard of Id with puppets and animated sets. The duo created the trailer embedded above.

Here’s more from the Jim Henson Company Archives: “Jim loved comics and cartoons and collected books of Pogo, Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, L’il Abner, Charles Addams, Jules Feiffer, Roger Price, James Thurber, and Johnny Hart. During the 1960s, Jim pursued several projects based on classic fairy tales, but the Wizard of Id project was the first time Jim sought out a creative collaborator with an existing character group. The snarky humor of Hart’s B.C. and Wizard of Id appealed to Jim, and he saw how his sensibility overlapped with these funnies.”

A few years later, Henson started work on Sesame Street and his first Muppet projects, so the show never happened. Last summer, biographer Brian Jay Jones sold a biography of Henson to Ballantine. (Via i09)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Who knew that Jim Henson created a TV pilot in 1969 based on Johnny Hart and Brant Parker’s Wizard of Id? Watch rare excerpts above and then read more background about the project on the superbly curated Henson Company blog.

The company is posting other rare historical materials on their YouTube account as well, such as this Aurora toilet paper ad from the mid-Sixties with a delightful pantomime hand by Frank Oz:

(via Mike Lynch Cartoons)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Brant Parker, Jim Henson, Johnny Hart, Wizard of Id