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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