B.C. Growingold 50-year Collection from Checker Book Publishing

To be honest, I'm not certain whether or not this book about the comic strip B.C. should be called Growing Old or Growin' Gold. Is it Growing Old, as in, the strip grew old a long time ago, or Growin' gold, a famous comic strip that is celebrating its golden anniversary.

Either one works for me. I don't want to be the one to say that B.C. grew old, because all comic strips do that. I remember a time when Garfield was funny, but now it is up there with Blondie, Hagar the Horrible, Hi and Lois, Beetle Bailey, and other comic strips that are only still in print simply because no one has the heart to pull the plug on them.

I realize that I'm being a little too harsh on the daily funnies, and I don't have the right to criticize. After all, I've never had to output one comic strip per day. I can only imagine the pressure that would have on me, not to mention the whole idea of continually putting out something funny. Too often I read the comics and just say: "That's not funny". It is only rare that I find a gem that makes me laugh out loud.

In reading this B.C. collection, I realized that its creator Johnny Hart did have a lot of gems in his half-century career. I'm not certain if I read the best of the strip in this collection, but I did laugh out loud several times.

I also learned several things about the strip that I never knew before. I had no idea that Hart based several of the characters after his peers. I also had no idea that B.C. originally started out short and fat, and somehow evolved over the years into a tall and thin shape. I suppose every artist draws his characters differently every day, and so the drawings slowly change over the years.

I thought it was odd that the book ignored B.C.'s overtly Christian comics. I remember this one strip where Wiley writes about "Good Friday", and many papers refused to print it due to some "separation of church and state" custom. I remember thinking that it was strange that a comic strip called B.C., which normally stands for Before Christ, would have so many strips overtly discussing Jesus. I wonder if these explicitly Christian comics were deliberately left out. I don't think I have a case here, because if they were going for the funniest strips, the preachy ones generally aren't.

Still, the B.C. Growingold Collection reminds us why we still read comics: some good clean fun that is sometimes so funny it makes us forget that the majority of the rest of the newspaper is full of bad news.