I haven't followed the cartoon strip B.C. in years. But I have many fond memories. Now, the author of those excellent three- and four-panel strips is dead:

Cartoonist Johnny Hart, who won awards and acclaim for creating the BC comic strip, has died at the age of 76.

I'm afraid my favorite Hart jokes were his epigrams, the poems attributed to Wiley, the peg-legged, misogynistic, aquaphobic curmudgeon. Here are two, from memory:

Feature the cone
And its function thereof.
It stands on its orifice
And points straight above.

Inverted and filled
It will tumble at once.
No wonder the cone
Symbolizes the dunce.

And this self-refential one:

Most of my poems
Are written in haste.
And therefore, resultingly,
Lacking in taste.

Yet people who read them
And think they are fine
Must surely have taste
Just as rotten as mine.

I have not read the bulk of his work in recent times, though I've seen a few of his controversial Christian cartoons. Much of the humor of the strip (which means, as my third grade teacher informed me, Before Christ) were all the anachronisms. There is nothing more anachronistic than a turtle and a bird and a clam in the age of dinosaurs and humans preaching about the separation of Church and State. Alas, most of these efforts seem more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha.

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