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Marschall: Text and art rather than panels or balloons, you mean?
Hart: All text and art or balloons, or a combination of all three. We deal with format restrictions. Things like, "Hey! What is Larson doing there, anyway? He's using a balloon and caption! You can't do that, you're breaking the format rules!" The Format Police would show up at the door . . . Anyway, we do that: we place all these restrictions on ourselves, we're frozen into all these things, the ways to do things.
Even in little ways, like in cartooning, I'm always amazed. For a long time I always drew eyes a certain way. I said, "Well, what are my characters going to have? Round eyes or those little eyelid type eyes? Little slits, like Cavalli used to do." But you can't have both. I'm drawing the strip for about 30 years and I said "Why can't we have both?" In this panel he can have his eyes half-closed and in this panel he can them open wide. People might say the character is losing his identity. It's like drawing Barney Google with slit eyes. We have all these restrictive things that go through our minds, about life in general. "Hey, you can't eat that with a fork!" And things like that.
Marschall: Self-restricted. You're not about to get an editor coming down on you . . .
Hart: No, but you feel like you're violating some rule. So these are all things that cause you stress, a little bit of stress in your life, along with all the other stressful things. Suddenly you say, "Wait a minute! I can do anything! I can be innovative!"
Marschall: When you have those little debates with yourself, is it from behind you, like a voice over your shoulder about tradition, or does it come from in front of you, on the drawing board? Are you wedded to the characters doing things a certain way because the characters are that way or because the business is that way?
Hart: It comes from both sources because the business is sort of that way. You never see Dagwood with his hair fluffed up. It's like when you create a character for recognizability, it's like a rubber-stamp thing, and the way you've created him, designed him, is the way he should always look. I notice that Dagwood does were shorts now, jeans, things like that. It looks a little weird, but it's still Dagwood.
Marschall: I even saw him shopping for shirts that didn't have that one big button in the middle. Now, you made a fairly distinctive change in B.C.'s appearance once, from being a tubby, bowling-pin character to being slimmer. That was conscious, wasn't it? You felt restrictions on the way he moved, the way he looked?
Hart: Yes. There was a time when I looked at him and said, "Wait a minute!" There were certain things that he couldn't do because of this silly shape that I put on him. He was a huge triangle, with a huge bottom and little short legs. His legs wouldn't bend; they didn't have knees -- and if they did bend, where would his body go? So I began to, probably gradually so I wouldn't violate the format, began to elongate his legs and slim down his body a little bit and at one point he reached the state where he had real long legs and a thin body.
I think I used to see a great deal of humor in the posturing and poses of Daffy Duck. Bent over with the rear end, Groucho Marx look, with the head sticking up. I thought my characters should take on that kind of a look. Wile E. Coyote. I saw a lot more humor in the trimmer characters with the funny, little body. I began to work toward that. Then one thing I noticed, I don't know how long I had been doing this, these guys hardly had any suits on any more. The suits had been reduced down to a longer body with this little black trim on the bottom. It's like I'd never noticed it before -- I'd been doing it gradually -- the suits are getting smaller and smaller, and suddenly one day I said, "Wait! What is this?" Originally, I had created him a pretty, thick suit for the blacks, for the look of it, so you wouldn't have all just lines on the paper -- you would have spotted blacks, and that added a nice look to the art because you had big, solid black spots, and then you could use Bendays [mechanical toned shading].
Marschall: Could you always translate what you saw in your mind's eye to paper?
Hart: In Georgia when I was first starting out I knew what I wanted to put down on paper in my mind, and I could see the look of it, but it still wouldn't come out of the hand. There was still a gap there somewhere. I kept trying and trying, working and working, and it just wouldn't happen. I was getting really, really frustrated this one night. I used to sit in this living room with a card table. I had a little bottle of ink and paper and I'm doing my stuff and I'm getting more and more frustrated. I made some kind of move and tipped the ink over and spilled it all over the drawings that I had done. And that did it. I sat there for a minute and then I just flipped the table and kicked the chair and Bobby comes running in, ink all over the floor and says, "What's wrong?" And I was ranting and raving about something, swearing, I guess, and for some reason, I don't know where it came from -- a Word of Knowledge, maybe -- I said, "You mark my words. Before I'm 27 I'm going to have a nationally syndicated comic strip."
That came to pass, as they say. Later Bobby said, "You remember the night that you did that? Do you remember what you said?" "No." But this was on the evening of my 27th birthday and we were looking at B.C. in living black and white in the New York Herald-Tribune.
Marschall: It had just come out?
Hart: That was the first night, the first strip.
Marschall: Its debut was on your birthday?
Hart: On the night before. So it came to pass before I was 27 years of age -- talk about a deadline! I forget -- I wrote it somewhere -- to my knowledge that's the last time I made a deadline [laughs].
Yeah, to the date. I sat there oblivious to that but Bobby didn't forget it because I think I scared her back in Georgia. Kicked things all over. This was back in 1952; we were just married.
Marschall: What were you 21 or 22, something like that?
Hart: Maybe. I was born in 1931 -- yeah, I was 21. And why that came out, because I didn't even know, I wasn't sure I said the word "syndicate" because I didn't even know what a syndicate was. But that's what she told me I'd said. I just got kind of goose pimples, and said "Really?" "That's what you said."
Marschall: Things are ordered. We haven't talked much about Wizard of Id. When did you come up with that idea? Did you always have in mind to collaborate with Brant?
Hart: No, as a matter of fact I had Jack [Caprio] slated to do that, but for whatever reason he didn't feel that he was up to it or didn't want to do it.
Marschall: You had the idea earlier?
Hart: Well, let's see, 1958 [B.C.'s debut] to '64 [The Wiz's debut] . . . I probably had the idea in 1960 because I shelved it for four years and I felt really weird about it and suddenly the light bulb came on and I said, "Brant!" Actually, Brant had been around since the inception of the Wizard.
One night we were all down at my house and I laid it on these guys -- Jack and Brant and Curls. And I said I have this idea and I have the drawings -- the King is going to look like a playing card; that's the way he started out. And the Jester is going to be a Jester and everybody is going to look the way they are. I laid it all out for them and we got like guys do when you've got something new -- we had this nice session going, ideas were flying around, we were having fun, and then we began to pursue it. Somewhere I have a thick package full of Wizard by Hart and Caprio laying around here.
Everything was ready to go and it just kind of dropped. I just put in on the shelf and went about my business. Then about four years later I said, "I've really got to do this thing," and I thought about Brant. So I called him and said, "If I write this thing, would you draw it?" And he said, "I'd love to." "OK -- we're on!" So we made this arrangement to meet in this hotel room -- at that time Brant was in Virginia -- a sleazy, fleabag hotel in New York City. I had all of the paper and the gags for about 24 strips and we had our bottles of ink. It was this terrible hotel room but it was about a block away from the Herald-Tribune, around the corner from it. We just holed up there for several days and we drew 24 Wizards. He penciled some and I penciled some and I'd ink some of his and he'd ink some of mine. We just went back and forth doing all this stuff and we put together the initial four weeks of the Wizard of Id, and as we did them we taped them up on the walls of the hotel room. The beds that we had were like these old bunks that they used to have in the barracks in World War II.
At some point we had painted the toilet to look like a character. The lid must have been a big nose, it was India ink around the edge of it, and big eyes on the back of the tank. It had a mustache and a bow tie and I think Brant even drew out a part of a body coming out across the tiles on the floor. It was really wacky. We had meals sent up. It was beginning to look like a dump up there. And we'd get it cleaned up somewhat but we had some beer bottles laying around on the floor . . . we were having the time of our lives. And when we finally taped the last one up on the wall, I called over to the syndicate and asked them if they wanted to see a new comic strip. "Really? Sure! Bring it in." "Can't do that." "Why not?" "Because we've got them taped all over the walls here." Twenty minutes later they came over. Brant and I were running around trying to look respectable; we're kicking beer bottles under the beds and I'm in there shaving and Brant is in his shorts, he's not even dressed, and here are these three syndicate guys in their black suits, white shirts, black ties -- they looked like the Mafia -- and they come into the room shaking hands and I come out in my shorts and I've got lather all over. I say, "Wait a minute!" And I go over and kick another beer bottle under the bed. So we go over it all and I say it's called Wizard of Id and we tell them about the lead characters. So they start walking around the walls like they're in a museum, with their hands behind their backs, and they're going around this flea-bag place with masking tape all over the walls, and they're going "hm, hm" like art connoisseurs.
Every so often they kick a bottle under the bed and Brant and I are just sitting there on the bunks and watching them go around the room -- a few chuckles here and there, yeah. Then they got all done and two of them turned around and the other guy sat down on the bed and he said, "Well, we think you guys are disgusting, but the strip is great." So, we all shook hands and he said, "We'll take it." And that was the whole trick.
