Johnny Hart's house is about a half-mile from any paved road. His mind, meanwhile, is several millennia away: back in the cave man days?dwelling with his friend, B.C. The two of them took up residence together several decades ago, with the consent and support of Hart's wife, Bobby. Then came another comic strip pal, "The Wizard of Id." Today, there's a communal cheer in the leafy woods where the Harts reside in rural New York State.

Johnny often rises at four in the morning, trying not to wake the wife of his youth (they've been married 44 years). He sneaks into the cool pre-dawn as geese honk down the hill on his lake.

He winds about a quarter of a mile around his lake ("As the crow walks," jokes Johnny), past his boat house, through some woods, up another hill, and?voila!?there in his studio they wait, his old pals.

"I wash my face and brush my teeth and it's dark out and I get to watch the sun come over the lake and it's really very blissful and fun," he says.

Johnny spends early mornings with his two-dimensional friends. B.C. is more than just a paper-and-ink cartoon. With the mirror-like quality of the lake by Johnny's studio, B.C. reflects Johnny. No, Johnny does not always pick up his pen and draw, rapturously ripping paper from his artist's board, discarding one idea for another. Those days are gone now, as unnecessary as practicing lay-ups might be for Michael Jordan.

Instead, most mornings Johnny collects his ideas, then he'll draw a week's worth of strips in a mere matter of hours, deftly moving from a pencil sketch to a final, inked version. Johnny?like Michael?has moved to the higher stages of his star-studded game; he wishes he could tell friends and inquirers that he doodles for hours every morning, but it just isn't so. Johnny's mornings often materialize into a high grade of sheer nothingness.

"I know how I waste a lot of my time," he cracks while hanging around his studio one cool day. "I just sit and think, who knows what, and it all gets logged up there, and I guess I draw on it. Sometimes I don't go home until six or seven o'clock at night, and sometimes I don't eat at all. That's what's wrong with me: my brain is plodding, and very often it's plogging, too!"

As casual as Johnny seems, his life is anything but laid back. From his earliest days struggling in tough New York City for his break in the cartooning world, to his mid-career rocket to fame, creating several working auxiliaries of himself, to his more recent recommitment to the Christian faith of his youth, Johnny has never been one for sitting on a stone and plogging; that, he leaves for B.C. or his caveman friend, Wiley.

On the contrary, Johnny is busier than ever carving out, if you will, a career he hopes glorifies God. His work has reaped rewards but also heavy costs.

Today, the gray-haired "gag man" (his own description) draws a caveman with ever-growing convictions. Hart believes the Lord put him into the cartooning world for a reason. Every prudent chance he gets, he takes advantage of it.

On Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter?and many days between?Hart's characters offer messages reflecting the cartoonist's own firm belief in the gospel message. "I find myself trying to put the gospel into practically every strip I create without being obvious about it," he says.

Hart says he wants to create a "spasm" in his reader, putting a new twist on an old truth. He's been creating nationwide twitches for years now, and his peers often have paid him homage:

?Best Humor Strip in America, six times (The National Cartoonist Society)

?The Reuben?Cartoonist of the Year (The National Cartoonist Society)

?The Yellow Kid Award for Best Cartoonist (The International Congress of Comics)

?Best Cartoonist of the Year (France's highest cartooning award)

?The Sam Adamson Award, twice (Sweden's international award for graphic artists)

?The Elsie Segar Award (King Features Syndicate).