America a Prophecy 4: Rose

Every year I write a new essay about one of the worst comic strips ever published, the September 11, 2011 edition of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. If you want to catch up, it went “here’s a close analysis of the actual strip” in 2021, “here’s the larger cultural context of decline within the American newspaper comic” the next year and then “here’s an analysis of mawkish sentimentality in public mourning” last year.

This year, we’re taking a deep dive into the creator of this strip. That would be John R. Rose, who’s been writing and drawing Barney Google and Snuffy Smith since 2001, having served as the inking assistant for his predecessor Fred Lasswell for three years prior. His story is not unlike that of any other sixty-one year old white man in a legacy industry like newspaper comics. He grew up in the second smallest city in Virginia, got a BFA from a state school, made a series of social contacts with various cartoonists, and got a job doing cartoons for local papers in Virginia, eventually ascending to the position of art director for the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg before getting the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith gig.

At no point in this career is there any evidence that Rose’s ascent was predicated on anything like talent or vision. This is plainly clear from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith alone. His predecessor’s final daily strips show a comic full of a sort of vapid yokel humor. His third from last, on May 17, 2001, is a two panel affair that sees Jughaid scolded by his teacher, “what took you so long to git a cup of water?” The second panel offers a landscape shot with Jughaid’s answer, “my furst cup had a frog in it,” emerging from the schoolhouse in the background while a well sits in the foreground. His final strip, meanwhile, is another two panel affair that sees Snuffy Smith beg Silas, the owner of the general store, for something to treat his “elderberry itch.” Silas smiles confidently and says he has just the thing, and the second panel shows him tickling a joyful Snuffy who exclaims, “It’s workin!!” Neither are particularly interesting, although to be fair they’re the work of a dying cartoonist who had been working on the strip for nearly seventy years. 

What is striking is that when Rose takes over there is essentially no change in quality. His first one sees Snuffy Smith laid up in bed, the doctor and his wife hovering over him. “If he stays off his feet and gets plenty of rest he’ll be better in no time!!,” promises the doctor. “Then he should be th’ pitcher of health already!!,” complains his wife. In the next one, Snuffy walks past his wife and the neighborhood gossip, both draped over a fence snoring. “Must be a slow news day!!,” chortles Snuffy. It’s not incompetent, in the sense that it is delivering joke-shaped things through visual storytelling, but it has no spark—there’s no point of view or sense of something to say. Rose’s sole ambition appears to be to be roughly as good and as interesting as the dying guy who had been there since before World War II. 

But perhaps the nearly century-old legacy strip is not the place where Rose was inclined to show any individual vision. After all, it wasn’t like he inherited the strip directly from Lasswell. Ultimately, King Features Syndicate were the ones who decided they were happy with the direction of the strip and wanted it to continue; Rose can hardly be faulted for delivering mediocrity if that’s what’s being asked for. It’s more productive, then, to look at his editorial cartooning work. That, after all, provides a relatively blank canvas day-in and day-out. Beyond the basic definition of the form—regular one panel cartoons about current events—there are no real inherent requirements to the editorial cartoon, and its practitioners can take it in any direction they want, both in terms of the political views on display and in terms of style.

Rose’s editorial work is more thinly documented—at the time of writing two significant swaths are preserved in easily accessible forms. The first are a selection of cartoons from the early 1990s that were collected in a 1996 book called Cartoons that Fit the Bill. The second are some of his late career cartoons that are still up, albeit poorly indexed, on the Daily News-Record site. These span broadly from 2016-2019, or the early years of the Trump era.

Let’s start with the earlier set, as they provide background for his assuming the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith job. The first thing that announces itself about these cartoons is that Rose is politically conservative. This is, in a way, almost relieving, as it provides the first evidence that Rose has any point of view whatsoever. Alas, he is not an especially interesting conservative. By and large, his conservatism consists of a reflexive partisanship in which he parrots Republican talking points of the time in as banal a way as possible. In a representative example, a man stands in a doctor’s office where Hillary Clinton (identifiable largely because Rose put a diploma reading “Dr. Hillary” in the wall) informs a man that “our health care plan will not cover the removal of that growth around your wallet” as the man looks alarmed at a miniature Bill Clinton hanging from his back pocket. 

It’s clearly enough a joke about Clinton’s health care plan costing a lot of money, but there’s no real wit to the presentation. Aside from the mildly charming absurdity of the miniature Clinton, it’s not especially funny. Nor is it seemingly concerned with persuasion—it’s impossible to imagine anyone’s opinion on Clinton’s health care policy being altered by this. The only pleasure it seems to offer is that of seeing one’s own distaste for Clinton’s policies reflected. 

Indeed, at times this attempt to simply regurgitate political emotions back at readers for an empty thrill of recognition seems to get in the way of actual coherence. Consider, for instance, a cartoon from around Thanksgiving 1993 in which Clinton, dressed in a pilgrim costume, grabs a turkey while holding an ax behind his back. The ax is labeled with bullet points: “Gas Tax, Middle Income Tax, Health Care Taxes,” while the turkey thinks, “I’m beginning to understand why he fattened me up with all those campaign promises!” 

That this is critical of Clinton as a tax and spend liberal is clear, but that’s about all that’s clear. The turkey is going to be executed with… taxes? In the form of an ax? Is the ax/tax pun deliberate? Is the turkey meant to represent something? For that matter, is the pilgrim costume? Or is this just bland Republican talking points dressed up in Thanksgiving cosplay for no reason other than the date?

Even less coherent is a 1995 cartoon in which an oversized snarling dog is superimposed with a table showing the increase in federal spending from 1970 to 1995. “Beware of dog…” the caption reads, while the dog’s tag reads “Gov’t spending,” as if this subject were not made perfectly clear by the table about government spending. But again, there’s no larger sense of joined up thinking here—just a bunch of political signifiers in a container exactly detailed enough to make fellow conservatives feel agreed with.

To the extent that any specific concern or interest of Rose’s emerges, it is a sense of petty and vapid sadism. There’s a tangible fixation on criticism of women and Black men—a barrage of anti-Hillary cartoons, cartoons about both Joceleyn Elders and Henry Foster, and no fewer than three about Colin Powell’s non-existent 1996 Presidential run. But these do not feel like some seething and hateful id coming to the fore so much as more banal reflections of the casual sexism and racism of the 90s Republican party. By and large, there is simply the hollow declaration of the conservative consensus in a structure that resembles a joke. 

In the Clinton era this was tiresome hackery. But by the Trump era, as American conservatism slid rapidly towards full on fascism, the incoherences of Rose’s approach reached an almost sublime inadequacy to their times. On the one hand he remained a dutiful conservative, delighting in things like Trump’s reversal of the Iran nuclear deal or his handling of the economy. 

And yet there’s a hesitance to his embrace of Trump in places—an awareness on some level that there is something wrong here. Most often this comes down to bemoaning Trump’s tendency to get into Twitter fights, or more broadly bemoaning his tendency to talk his way into trouble.

All the same, there are firm limits to his willingness to push against the conservative consensus. His cartoons about the Mueller inquiry, for instance, give Trump a near complete pass and clutch the pearls that anyone would ever investigate his ties to Russia. He can be found reveling in the supposedly transformative power of events that proved to be complete nothings like the Nunes memo. 

And yet for all of this he seems strangely unable to quite let go of the sense that, actually, there’s something wrong here. In amidst his cartoons blasting the investigation of Trump he’ll pen one that seems to take the problems of his relationship with Putin seriously.

For the most part the Trump era seems like a quiet conceptual breaking point for Rose. He grows increasingly agitated about what he views as the lack of civility in Washington. His treatment of this, however, is wholly blind to the notion that there might be a cause. It is simply a systemic problem, understood only as a sense of moral decline.

In many ways, then, it seems more interesting to look at Rose’s less political cartoons. In his latter years around half of his cartoons are entirely uninterested in DC politics. These fall into several camps. There’s saccharine public mourning of various famous people,

Complaints about the weather,

Sports commentary,

Or, sometimes, the almost completely inscrutable. 

To the extent that these cartoons can be said to reflect a viewpoint, it seems to be one of a constant yearning for a seemingly absent normality. Their collective viewpoint is that all the old legends are dying, the stores you’ve heard of are dying, the weather is weird, and soon there will be flying cars. In the face of this, the only certainty is Rose’s sense of cantankerous mourning, so steadfast that he uses the exact same visual setup for three memorial cartoons in a one year period.

In light of all of this, Rose’s 9/11/11 Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip feels less remarkable in several ways. Its lack of quality and its idiotic sentimentality are firmly in keeping with Rose’s larger ouvre. The fact that Rose is, in fact, a politically committed conservative makes sense of the emotive glurge he trafficks in. There becomes an awful coherence to it all.

This understanding, however, is profoundly misleading, serving to mask the extent to which this actually is quite weird. I mean, scroll back up and look at that NCAA bracket one. What’s even going on there? What’s with the repeated use of newspaper headlines as props to illustrate what the comic is about, even in things like the pot of gold comic where nothing like this is needed? How, thirty years into a career as a professional cartoonist, is John Rose still so comprehensively mystified by the basic notion of what a joke is?

For all that Rose’s asinine lack of nuance or insight is uninteresting and provides a hard wall for any serious effort to prise deeper meaning out of any of his literally thousands of terrible comics, there is still a surreal and arresting perversity to the gap between their zero-effort emotive certainty and a world that does not and more to the point can not possibly support such a comprehensively hollow sense of understanding. For all that it’s tempting to call it a relief that Rose stepped back from editorial cartoons in 2018 such that we do not have to see him grapple with COVID or the January 6th insurrection, the fact of the matter is that watching his cozy idiocy tackle a world that is coming apart at the seams in earnest feels like about the only way it could ever be interesting.

It would not, however, tell us much of anything about the 9/11/11 Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip. Still, let’s try to use the basic insight to our advantage. If Rose’s work is most interesting when the gap between its vapidity and its subject matter’s complexity is pronounced then we ought to consider what complexities we can find within the strip. And while there are few to be found about jingoistic post-9/11 patriotism, there are considerable ones to be found in the specific container of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, which, even if it had by 2011 fallen thoroughly into cultural irrelevance, still had a century of history upon which it rested.

Next Time: The Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes