Setting
The characters live, for the most part, in caves, in what appears to be a barren, mountainous desert by an unidentified sea. Background detail is often limited to a simple horizon line broken up by the occasional silhouettes of a stray volcano or cloud. "Retail stores", "shop counters" and "businesses" are symbolized by a single boulder, labeled (for instance) "Wheel repair", "Advice column", "Psychiatrist", etc. The February 5, 2012 strip gives a nearby location of N 53° 24' 17" W 6° 12' 3", which is in present day Dublin Ireland.
Originally, the strip was firmly set in prehistoric times, with the characters clearly living in an era untouched by modernity. Typical plotlines, for example, include B.C.'s friend Thor (inventor of the wheel and the comb) trying to discover a use for the wheel. Thor was also seen making calendars out of stone every December. Other characters attempt to harness fire or to discover an unexplored territory, like Peter trying to find the "new world" by crossing the ocean on a raft. Animals like the dinosaur think such thoughts as, "There's one consolation to becoming extinct—I'll go down in history as the first one to go down in history." Grog arrived in early 1966, emerging from an iceberg which melted to reveal what Clumsy Carp called a "Prehistoric Man".
B.C., like Hart's Wizard of Id, is a period burlesque with a deliberately broad, non-literal time frame. As time went on the strip began to mine humor from having the characters make explicit references to modern-day current events, inventions, and celebrities. Increasingly familiar visual devices, like the makeshift "telephone" built into a tree trunk, also started to blur the comic's supposed prehistoric setting and make it rife with intentional anachronisms. One of the comic's early out-of-context jokes, from June 22, 1967, was this one:
- Peter: "I used to think sun revolved around the earth."
- B.C.: "What does it revolve around?"
- Peter: "The United States!"
Another early example: near Christmas time, the apteryx, dressed as Santa Claus, modified his usual spiel: "I'm an ApterClaus, a wingless toymonger with batteries not included!" The Washington Post columnist and comics critic Gene Weingarten—B.C. suggested that it is set not in the past but in a dystopic, post-apocalyptic future.
Read more about this topic: B.C. (comic strip)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–59 B.C.)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)