Johnny **HART** on working with Brant Parker on The Wizard of Id

MARSCHALL: How does the collaboration on Wizard work? You write it or you run the shop? Jack Caprio writes for you, Dick Boland still writes? HART: I be the head editor. That's sort of the role I keep seeing myself in more than the creative. Essentially it's this: I write and draw B.C. and I write the Wizard and Brant draws it. That's what everybody sees, essentially. Al Capp told me once, "Nobody wants to know that you don't do it all yourself." I don't necessarily agree. That may say more about Al Capp than it does about...is there an echo in here?
Now, behind the scenes, Jack writes for both strips; well, all three guys write for both strips. At one time Jack wrote for both strips, Curls wrote for just the Wizard, and recently I brought in Cavalli. Cavalli was writing for B.C. and I'm being the editing guy making all this stuff work. I just recently added the Wizard to Cavalli. So now all three write for both. I have lots of good material coming in now. I do pretty much all of the B.C. Sundays myself.
MARSCHALL: Does Brant contribute to the ideas?
HART. No.
MARSCHALL: Now it's a geography thing, but when he lived closer was there anything like that?
HART: No, he meddles. Every so often Brant has to meddle. I know what he's doing. He has periods when he feels out of the creative loop so he starts toying with punch lines or dialogue. And he'll throw it at me and we'll snowball on the phone and we'll have fun. Probably nine times out of ten when he calls up for some- thing like that, it really wasn't thought out as well as it should have been. When we get done, we usually turn it into a classic because we'll spend 20 to 30 minutes on it. Suddenly we're both laughing like hell and the gag is nothing like before -- it's a totally different gag. And we have a great time doing it.
Brant does contribute in that way. When we put the characters together, Brant has great suggestions and he has this insight about how the characters should work on a page and he'll say, "Well, what if you had them do this?" And it always leads down a better road. So Brant does con- tribute, but he won't write gags or submit them or anything like that.