Johnny Hart, the creator BC and The Wizard of Id, has passed away. Creators’ Syndicate did a little tribute (hat tip to Batesline).

Hart was notable for a couple of reasons.

1. His comic strips were not brilliant, though they were pretty good. But he had two of them running in a lot of papers — an extraordinary achievement.
2. He was instrumental in changing the way comic strip artists and authors benefited from their own work: “Because of his commitment, syndicates no longer insist on ownership when they sign new cartoonists. He had revolutionized an entire industry, and empowered cartoonists to take control of their work and demand the freedoms they enjoy in their contracts today.”
3. He wore his Christian faith on his sleeve. Today’s cartoonists are almost all blatantly political, but with the passing of Charles Schulz and Johnny Hart, expressly religious topics aren’t likely to find their way back into comics. Sometimes he stepped on toes — Jewish ones (oversensitive ones, in my opinion) and Muslim ones (perhaps not so oversensitive, actually, based on this story — scroll down), but it was remarkable that he got away as much as he did.

It’s just comics, but I once wanted to draw and write comics and as a child I drew and dabbled quite a bit; one of my high school and college friends grew up to do just that (of course he blogs too), and I envy him a little. I’ll miss Johnny Hart a little, too.

Plimpton, that is. You don’t remember George Plimpton?

He edited the Harvard Lampoon and the Paris Review. He appeared in Rio Lobo with John Wayne and on The Simpsons with … the Simpsons. He had his nose bloodied by former light-heavyweight champ Archie Moore, pitched to Willie Mays and, most famously, played quarterback for the Detroit Lions. His friend Hunter S. Thompson once called him “the finest advertisement for Harvard University since LSD-25.” He drove a tank in the U.S. Army, interviewed Ernest Hemingway, and served as New York’s “official fireworks commissioner.” He partied with Norman Mailer, Muhammad Ali, Marianne Moore, and Jaqueline Kennedy. He made [things] up. We’re talking, of course, about George Plimpton—the sui generis pioneer of participatory journalism.

And Radar magazine says that a guy named Toby Barlow is trying to get support for his pet project: Getting a statue to the great man erected in New York City.

That sounds like a stretch, though Plimpton’s unusual career and talent certainly do seem to be entitled to a some kind of memorial. But a target for Manhattan pigeons? He was of that old WASP stock, true — the sorts of people who do have statues in the park. A literary man — he founded Paris Review — he was remarkable for how he stepped outside of the Harvard-man-of-letters stereotype and, still true to his craft, lived and explored life in at least three very enthusiastic dimensions. So perhaps a statue isn’t such a bad idea, after all. The only problem is that unlike Plimpton, it would be standing still.