The man who gave us B.C.

Johnny Hart drew his earliest prehistoric cartoons in a tiny apartment in Macon

(Weekly history lessons in celebration of Macon’s 200th birthday in 2023.)

Johnny Hart died the day before Easter in 2007.

The irony was not lost on those who knew him. Some newspapers refused to run his B.C. comic strips containing Christian messages. On Easter Sunday in 2001, he got pushback when his cartoon depicted a menorah (a seven-branched Jewish candelabrum) being transformed into a cross with the text of Jesus Christ's last words.

Hart published his first B.C. caveman comic strip in 1958, and gave birth to a sibling, "The Wizard of Id,’’ two years later. His combined work on both strips inspired Time Magazine to call him the world’s"most syndicated comic author." The Washington Post once hailed Hart as "the most widely read writer on earth," with more than 100 million readers worldwide. Chuck Colson, who served in Richard Nixon’s White House, referred to him as the “most widely read Christian of our time.’’

Laughter. Dedication. Inspiration. Those were Hart’s gift to the world.

And it all started in a tiny upstairs apartment on Georgia Avenue in Macon, located down the hill from the old Wesleyan Conservatory (now the main post office) and up the hill from the old Pig 'n Whistle drive-in restaurant .

It was the apartment where Hart began to doodle and dream up some of his earliest ideas for comic strips. 

Hart was stationed at Robins Air Force Base. He worked for the base newspaper and was a photographer for the public information office. He met his wife, Ida Jane “Bobby” Hatcher, at a dance at the base. She was a lab technician at Macon Hospital.   They were married April 26, 1952, in the chapel at Robins.