Inside the Comic That Saved Johnny Cash’s Career

It was 1976, and Johnny Cash was in trouble. Once the golden-voiced king of country music, the end of the ‘60s had not been kind to the former superstar. Changing tastes and sliding record sales had led to the cancellation of The Johnny Cash Show in 1971, and an ongoing struggle with drug addiction put a halt to any comeback. But from his valley of despair, the Man in Black was preparing to walk a path to salvation—and he was about to find a very surprising way to do it.

The creation of Hello, I’m Johnny Cash, the autobiographical comic book that helped put Cash back on the cultural map, involved an unlikely cast of characters, including a longtime artist for Archie Comics, a personal preacher to President Gerald Ford, and an outlaw country singer preparing to take to the Gospel Road. Now, comics publisher Z2 is introducing a whole new generation to the long-forgotten book, 50 years after its initial publication.

So just in time for Local Comic Shop Day on September 26, the publisher has reissued Hello, I’m Johnny Cash in prestige form: restored, reprinted, and sporting a set of collectible variant covers by the likes of designer Chip Kidd. It’s a handsome package for a book that Z2 president Josh Bernstein describes as “almost like a weird Rosetta Stone” for Cash’s life and attitude.

The Man in Black Finds the Lord

The story of Hello, I’m Johnny Cash really began on May 9, 1971, when Cash—whose struggle with substance abuse was taking a toll on his record sales and public appearances—stood up in front of a congregation in Nashville, Tennessee and declared himself born again.

So for the next decade, Cash would reinvent himself as a guitar-strumming public ambassador for evangelical Christianity, playing and preaching alongside evangelist Billy Graham. It was at one of Graham’s chapel services that Cash probably met Billy Zeoli, the man destined to be his comic book mouthpiece. By the mid ‘70s, Zeoli—A preacher, writer, and White House chaplain to Gerald Ford—had become both Cash’s public advisor and private confidant.

“They were close then,” Billy’s son Steve Zeoli told PW. “My dad functioned as an encouragement to him in many ways. Not so much his faith, but also his addiction that he was coming to grips with.”

In 1973, when Johnny and June Carter Cash produced and starred in an ambitious musical biopic of Jesus called Gospel Road, it was Zeoli’s production company, Gospel Films, that handled its distribution to churches and Christian groups—a market that turned out to be among the film’s most lucrative.

So the idea was sparked: If Cash’s music and charisma could get a movie into churches across America, why not a comic book? Cash already had a celebrity co-writer in Zeoli. Now he found an artist right under his nose.

The man who had drawn the lobby cards for Gospel Road was an unlikely figure to be working in comics. Al Hartley was a product of old-line New Jersey Republicans: his father, Congressman Frederick Allan Hartley, Jr., was the coauthor of the Taft-Hartley Act restricting labor unions in 1947. But from early on, young Al marched to his own drum, studying art, and going on to become one of the foremost pencilers of teen–centric cartooning, best known for his long association with Archie Comics.

But in 1967, Hartley became a born-again Christian, and started working for a new employer alongside Archie: Spire Christian Comics, which published inspirational bio-comics based on popular books and born-again celebrities. (Both football coach Tom Landry and Richard Nixon’s advisor Charles Colson were among their subjects.) Why not add Cash to this oddball lineup?

The comic Cash and company created is a fascinating document. Drawn in the straightforward cartoon style that Hartley was known for, you wouldn’t be surprised to see Archie Andrews stroll onstage as part of Johnny’s band. Yet even though the story follows the then-standard narrative of Cash’s rescue from addiction through God, it nevertheless contains some surprisingly gritty moments.

It was those moments of hard-edged realism that first made Z2’s Bernstein take notice of Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.

“He goes into that comic harder than you would think you would in a story for children,” Bernstein told PW. “There are so many drawings of the pills he ingested, and what he had to do to get onstage, and the hard living [he did].”

For Bernstein, who had never heard of the long-forgotten book until finding a copy on eBay, it was an eye-popping new addition to the legacy of a music legend.

“I’d never heard of it,” Bernstein says. “And I’m a Johnny Cash fanatic and I’m a comic book lunatic.” Pointing out that, though other rock ‘n roll comics had been licensed by musicians, Cash’s might have been the first actually co-authored as an autobiography, Bernstein says, “This guy did something pretty landmark and groundbreaking at its time and I don’t think people appreciated it. And I just wanted to get him back in his rightful place.”

“My fear was that this story could get lost in the sands of time,” Bernstein continues. “It’s my duty if I could step in and let other people know that this exists.”