ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 5/11/01

I've received a few e-mails asking what I think of Johnny Hart's allegedly anti-Semitic Easter installment of his newspaper strip, B.C.  My view is that, given Mr. Hart's tendency to tell interviewers that Jews are condemned to rot in Hell for all eternity, I doubt it was intended as innocently as claimed in his "I regret if some people misunderstood the strip" press release.

On the other hand, I think "anti-Semitic" vastly overstates the case and that to make this a big issue is to greatly overreact.  I mean, even if it were intended with malice — which I also doubt — on a list of rotten things that bigots have done to my people, a clumsy joke in a comic strip doesn't even make the Top 10,000.

If you want to protest something, try this: Many members of the press covering this tepid controversy have picked up and quoted his syndicate's claim that Johnny Hart is — and I quote directly from the Creators Syndicate website — "...the most widely read writer on earth."  This determination is attributed to The Washington Post and is echoed by similar quotes from World Magazine and Time Magazine.

Today (4/18/01), an editorial writer in the New York Post writes, "The most widely read cartoon strip in the world — Johnny Hart's B.C. — is under fire for being too overtly Christian."

A few days ago, 4/15, an article in The Jewish World Review referred to: "Johnny Hart, a believing Christian whom the Guinness Book of World Records recognizes as the most syndicated cartoonist alive..."

There have been quite a few of these and, reading them all, I'm amazed: Johnny Hart is the most widely read writer in the world?  His strip is the most widely read on this planet?

Says who?

The media love extremes — the biggest this, the most expensive that.  Reporters love to elevate whatever they're assigned to write about.  Makes them more important.  For some reason, we usually buy these claims...or, at least, we too often allow them to go unchallenged.

A few weeks ago, you probably heard or read somewhere the oft-cited contention that more than a billion people tune in to watch each Academy Awards ceremony.  Odds are, you just accepted that, perhaps registering a smidgen of awe.

But consider for a second: "A billion people?"  Really?

This year, the Nielsen Ratings said that 72.2 million Americans watched some portion of the Oscar telecast.  Think how many would tune in if the show were actually entertaining.

Now, that's down a little from past years but at no point has that number ever been above 75 million.  There are around 284,000,000 people in the United States...so close to one in four Americans tuned in.  Most do not stick it out, by the way.  The average audience at any given moment this year was a measly 49 million.

But even if 75 million Americans are watching, that means that 925,000,000 people outside the U.S. must be tuning in for the total audience to hit one billion.  Do we really think that's likely?

At last report, the population of the world was a little over 6 billion, of which around a fifth live in China.  I think it's safe to say that no significant Chinese hordes flock to Oscar parties and lust to learn what the stars are wearing and what Joan Rivers is saying about their facelifts.  Few in China speak English, fewer still see our movies...and, of course, the fact that the show is not televised there would tend to cut into the ratings a bit.

The ceremony, in fact, is not televised in well over half the world.  The Academy makes no claims about its reach, saying only that the show is seen in "over 100 countries."  In some places, that could be two natives with a satellite dish.  We don't know the viewership because only a few of those nations have anything resembling the Nielsens.

So the number of Oscar viewers is just someone's blue-sky, outta-nowhere guess — and probably not a very sound one.  If only one in four Americans watches an American event about (mostly) American movies with American stars, what must the ratio be like in Sri Lanka?  Or Paraguay?  Do we really think we're going to snag the other 925,000,000 viewers in Abu Dhabi?

Still, every year, reporters pick up the "billion viewers" detail from one another and unquestioningly write it into their stories, perpetuating the whopper.  (This year, a story on the Fox News website claimed two billion.)

And we just nod like freshly-lobotomized outpatients and go, "Wow...a billion or more viewers.  Awesome!"

The same sort of unexamined, blindly-accepted stats bring us the assertion that Johnny Hart is the most widely read writer on the planet today.  As much as I revere the art form, I find it hard to believe that that honor belongs to someone who draws a comic strip.

Currently, The Guinness Book of World Records says that the best-selling fiction author of all time is Agatha Christie.  Her 78 crime novels have sold an estimated 2 billion copies in 44 languages.  They also state that the 80 titles in the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine have sold 220 million copies worldwide since the first book was published in 1992.

They also mention — modestly, I'm sure — that, excluding the Bible and the Koran, the all-time best-selling book is The Guinness Book of World Records.  Hey, if I were them, I'd mention it.  (One thing they don't seem to say is what the writer for the Jewish World Review says they said about the circulation of B.C..  They actually give the trophy for "Most Syndicated Comic Strip" to Peanuts.)

Cruising the best seller lists, I see an article that says that Stephen King sold 38.3 million books in the nineties.  I assume that's counting multiple copies of the same book although, knowing King, he just might have written that many.

Still, as prolific and popular as he is, John Grisham makes King look like a fanzine publisher.  In the same period of time, Grisham sold 60,742,288 books.

The Creators Syndicate site claims that — here's another cut-'n'-paste — "Johnny Hart's B.C. brings laughter to more than 100 million readers worldwide."  So the claim here is that, in one day, Hart not only reaches more readers than Grisham and King do in ten years, he makes them all laugh.

So I don't think Johnny Hart is the most widely-read writer in the world today...but is he at least the most widely-read cartoonist?

No, I don't think he's that, either.  But before we go there, let me note that collections of Peanuts, Garfield, Dilbert, Fox Trot and other syndicated strips routinely appear and sell quite well.  Meanwhile, in the last few decades, no one has put out books of B.C. or Wizard of Id.  You'd think the most widely-read writer in the world could move a couple of paperbacks, wouldn't you?

Now, then, to the suggestion that Hart might be the most widely-read cartoonist....

I dug up the original article in the Post, which was written by a man named Gene Weingarten.  Here is the relevant paragraph:

Four decades later, Johnny Hart is still drawing B.C.  He also collaborates on The Wizard of Id, a strip set in medieval times. Each appears in more than 1,200 newspapers worldwide, which reach almost 100 million readers.  There are a few strips with slightly fatter circulation — Peanuts, Blondie and Garfield, for example — but only Hart has two bestsellers, and taken together, they far outnumber any of the others. Which means, in a sense, that he is the most widely read writer on Earth.

So that's how someone arrived at that claim.  They added the alleged audiences of his two strips together and decided that made him the cartoonist with the largest readership.  From that, it was a small but illogical leap to the assertion that he was the most widely read writer.

This article appeared on 4/14/99.  Charles Schulz passed away ten months later and the following paragraph appeared in the Washington Post obit...

The cartoon strip [Peanuts], which made its debut Oct. 2, 1950, was...syndicated to more than 2,600 newspapers around the world...The Washington Post, which was among the first newspapers to carry the strip, ran it until the end.

Washington has apparently been gripped by George W. Bush's famed "fuzzy math."  You have Hart's two strips each in 1,200 papers and, taken together, they "far outnumber" a strip in 2,600 papers.  And as I read that paragraph, the author is claiming that a strip like Peanuts — which he doesn't mention has 2,600 papers — has a "slightly fatter circulation" than a Hart strip with 1,200.

Yeah, right.  And I have a "slightly fatter" waistline than Calista Flockhart.

The Guinness Book of World Records says that when Charles Schulz died, Peanuts was in 2,620 newspapers, which matches my understanding.  Since the strip went reprint, it's lost a few but Garfield is in more than 2,600.  A few others — Dilbert, For Better or Worse and Blondie — are probably also in more papers than Hart's two combined.

But Hart comes close, doesn't he?  And he does have those 100 million readers, right?

Not really.  Adding his strips' circulations together is a meaningless, illusory trick...though not dissimilar from a bit of Creative Accounting that is habitually practiced in syndication.  It involves counting daily and Sunday newspapers separately.  If your strip is in the Picayune Post-Dispatch Monday through Saturday, that's one paper.  And if they also carry your strip in a Sunday edition, you're said to be in two papers.

When you read, "B.C. appears in 1,200 newspapers," that's not 1,200 different newspapers.  It could be half that number, and some of those newspapers might only publish once a week and/or reach about the same number of people you can fit in a Mazda and/or who watch XFL games nationwide, whichever is less.

Moreover, if B.C. is in 1,200 papers and Wizard of Id is in 1,200 papers, it doesn't mean Hart is in 2,400 papers.  An awful lot of papers that carry one strip carry the other.  Same thing with the alleged readership.  That number is probably a fib also, because it's derived from the circulation figures of the newspapers that carry the strips in question.

The U.S. newspaper with the highest circulation of those that carry syndicated funnies is The Los Angeles Times, which sells about 1,300,000 of each weekday edition and 1,600,000 on Sunday.  This does not mean that, if your strip appears in both, you have 2,900,000 readers...or that if you have two strips, you have 5,800,000 readers.  That's counting an awful lot of people twice or maybe even four times.

More significantly: No one knows how many people read one particular feature in a newspaper.  We only have vague, arguable surveys as to how many people turn at all to the comics page, let alone read any given strip.

Some claim that each newspaper is read by multiple readers but no one claims that the total readership of the paper is the total readership of everything in it — every item, every recipe, every classified ad.  One of the reasons newspapers are set up the way they are, with clearly-subdivided sections, is that they know that some people are only interested in the sports page or the headlines or today's horoscope.

Clearly, not all strips on any comic page are equally-popular, equally-read.  If they were, there'd be no reason to ever change strips.  Clearly too, the L.A. Times doesn't think all its subscribers are racing each morn to read B.C..  If they did, they wouldn't have just dropped it.

Johnny Hart has been around the biz a long time.  He knows that, every day, a lot more readers — perhaps as many as twice the number — can find a Jim Davis strip in their newspapers, as could turn to a Johnny Hart strip.  Still, he allows his syndicate to make it sound like he has, by far, the largest readership.

Sometimes, in the Hart strip, they'll find a religious tract.  I have never cared for those who proselytize.  I especially don't like when they attack with an overt or even implied contempt for those who have come to a different interpretation of God...or none at all.

Nevertheless, I think Hart has the right to put whatever he wants in his comic strip and will — as the saying goes — fight to the death for his right to do so.  I will also fight for a paper's right to drop him, as many have, if they think he's become a bore...or even because they just plain don't want preaching on their comics page.  No codicil of the First Amendment says that anyone has a right to have their work purchased and published by any given newspaper.

What Hart does in that vein is of little bother to me; not even when he insists my people are Hades-bound for not believing as he does.  Those who already believe that, believe that.  Frankly, if there's an afterlife, I think they're in for a surprise and if there isn't an afterlife...well, then they're in for an even bigger shock.

When crusaders come to my doorstep, I tell them I resent the notion that my spiritual beliefs are so shallow that they can be amended by a three-minute sales pitch and a couple of pamphlets.  I say, "I don't buy cookies from door-to-door salespeople...I'm not about to buy a new religion that way."  I feel the same way about the notion that a cartoonist might change my convictions with a couple of Sunday pages.

So to me, Hart's ongoing evangelization is, at worst, an annoyance...and cartoonists, God knows, have a right to annoy.

I am much more troubled by the spreading of this lie that Johnny Hart is the most widely read writer in the world today, or even the most widely read cartoonist.  Because a lot of people who write about strips know nothing about the business — or are perhaps spinning numbers to make their subject seem more important than he is — someone somewhere might be convinced.  Equally distressing is that, all the time Hart has been eulogizing Charles M. Schulz as a great man, he has actively or tacitly been trying to usurp one of Mr. Schulz's greatest honors.

Johnny Hart likes to throw Bible quotes at his readers so, just in case he sees this, I'll include one for his benefit...

The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in men who are truthful. (Proverbs 12:22)

Amen.