Johnny Hart Pointed People to Christ in the Funny Papers
Breakpoint
Colson Center
4.8 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How the creator of the Wizard of Id and B.C. taught millions about the resurrection of Christ.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. |
| 0:05.4 | For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. |
| 0:09.2 | On April 7, 2007, Holy Saturday that year, cartoonist Johnny Hart died of a stroke while working at his drawing table. |
| 0:16.2 | Hart was the award-winning creator of two popular comic strips, The Wizard of Vis and BC, which at one time reached 100 million readers worldwide every single day. |
| 0:26.4 | In a 1999 breakpoint commentary, Chuck Holson identified Hart as the most widely read Christian of our time, with more readers than C.S. Lewis, Frank Peretti, and Billy Graham combined. |
| 0:36.3 | He wasn't wrong. Raised in a moderately |
| 0:38.4 | religious home, Hart's faith became more serious around 1984 when a born-again father-son |
| 0:43.7 | teen had installed a satellite dish in his home. Not long after that, his Christianity became |
| 0:49.7 | more and more evident in his comic strips. According to Hart, and I quote, it started out like when Christmas would roll around. |
| 0:56.3 | If a holiday comes up, I do something about the holiday, |
| 0:59.2 | I've been doing that for the life of the strip, he said. |
| 1:01.8 | Well, in my view, Hart was always at his very best around Easter time. |
| 1:06.1 | His most controversial strip was published on Easter of 2001. |
| 1:09.6 | It featured a Jewish menorah. As the panels of the |
| 1:12.5 | strip progressed, the seven candles burn out, each one captioned with one of the seven last |
| 1:17.9 | words of Jesus from the cross. After the final candle is extinguished, captioned with Jesus' words, |
| 1:22.9 | it is finished. The arms of the menorah break off and leave there just a cross. The final panel |
| 1:28.8 | portrays a trail of blood from the cross to the empty tomb, with the stone rolled away, revealing |
| 1:33.7 | the Lord's table arranged inside. At the time, Hart was accused of being anti-Semitic and of |
| 1:39.0 | suggesting a form of replacement theology, the idea that Christianity supplants Judaism. Part clarified later that he was |
| 1:46.6 | only attempting to demonstrate the Jewish roots of Christianity out of respect for both religions. |
| 1:52.4 | And of course, according to the Gospels, Jesus claimed to have completed the requirements of |
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