america a prophecy

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.…

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Scrape away the deconstructive close-reading, scrape away the history of decline, scrape away the entire wilfully absurd edifice of an annual blog series devoted to it and what you are left with is an unusually bathos-heavy bit of glurge.

The word “glurge” was coined by Patricia Chapman on a mailing list attached to the website Snopes. “Glurge” referred to a specific category of urban legend—the heartwarming, inspirational, and completely uncited and often fact-free stories that were often sent via e-mail in the late 90s and early 00s by the sorts of elderly relatives who would soon be preyed upon by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart. The term originally came out of the site’s then focus on urban legends, describing a common style of story characterized by an unabashed and excessive sentimentality. A doctor operates for free on a young girl that once gave him a glass of milk. A dying child comes back from the brink when her brother sings “You Are My Sunshine.” A marine comforts a dying stranger in the hospital. Stuff like that. 

9/11 provided something of a heyday of glurge—a sticky, cloying spray of it so voluminous that it becomes possible to identify distinct subgenres of glurge. There’s state glurge, like a motley collection of Members of Congress singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps. There’s imperialist glurge, like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” There’s first responder fetishism, stories of American resilience, impassioned insistence about the dignity of American Muslim. And then, of course, there’s the category that John Rose’s Barney Google and Snuffy Smith comic fits into: public mourning.

Public mourning is a concept I’ve always had a complicated relationship with. There’s a stagedness to it—a sense of perfunctory ritual in the place of actual emotive content—that runs counter to how I experience grief. Equally, of course, there are people who value it highly. One need only look at the scenes taking place in the UK when the last post went up and the sheer number of people standing in an hours-long line to shuffle past a box to see that these rituals of mourning carry weight. This is an important thing to keep in mind when we look at a misfiring bit of public mourning like the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip.

On the other hand, it’s not an especially radical observation to note that public mourning really can go embarrassingly wrong. Perhaps the worst piece of public mourning glurge I ever saw for 9/11 came a few years before I wrote that essay, in the parking lot for my vet’s office in Florida, where a car routinely sat bearing a bumper sticker that read “am I the only one who still mourns 9/11?” Like the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip, this bumper sticker provokes a certain awed horror. The question it asks is singularly stupid—the only possible response is “of course you aren’t, you narcissistic twatwaffle.” But this reveals what should be perfectly obvious, which is that the question is rhetorical.…

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CW: Racist imagery, not discussed by the larger essay

One complicating factor in our exegesis of the 9/11/11 Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip is that the strip exists in two different forms with two distinctly different resonances. Last year we discussed a five panel version of the strip, however another version exists and saw publication with an additional sixth panel at the beginning of the strip.

At first glance this version of the strip seems to collapse some of our discussions, particularly around whether Snuffy’s final line constitutes a punchline or not. The addition of Snuffy reading a newspaper marking the anniversary of 9/11 and weeping while Jughaid looks in from the window and weeps alongside him removes the element of bathetic surprise that the five panel version of the strip traded on. More to the point, it renders the strip strangely incoherent—if Jughaid has just been weeping at the cover of the newspaper, his confusion as to what the strange perambulatory ritual that Snuffy is engaged in might be about becomes harder to reconcile. 

Broadly speaking, and inasmuch as discussions of craft can be applied to the strip, the addition of the new opening panel unquestionably harms the strip, muddying its intentions and rendering it incoherent in places where its coherence had been, if not strictly speaking a positive, at least broadly interesting. But while the panel muddies interpretation of the strip, it is clarifying in a different sense. The key question to ask is simple: why are there two different versions of the 9/11/11 Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip in the first place?

The answer is tied to the medium of newspaper comics themselves. By 2011 (or indeed decades earlier) newspaper comics sections had become extremely compressed things that attempted to fit as many comics into as small a space as possible. To accommodate this, the syndicates that distribute the comics sought to ensure the comics were rearrangeable. Part of this meant that the initial panels of a Sunday strip had to be disposable—the comic had to work with or without them. An ordinary example can be found in this 1991 Calvin and Hobbes strip, in which the first two panels are a standalone gag that the remaining panels do not depend on.

In fact the rearranging goes far further, however. Note in the Calvin and Hobbes strip that the second two rows divide into four equally sized quadrants. This means that if a newspaper wants they can shrink the art down, move the first panel of the second row to the first row, and run the remaining panels as a second row, taking up even less space (while also using the full version of the comic). A similar thing is possible with the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip—in its five panel version, panels two and three are equally sized so that it can be run in two rows instead of three, which is the format we discussed it in last year. Other strips are even further compressible—it’s entirely normal for a strip to be comprised of entirely equally sized panels so that it can be rearranged in any sort of grid or even in a single column that can be shoved down the side of a page.…

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America a Prophecy is a new ongoing blog series on Eruditorum Press. It will post annually.

On September 11th, 2011, ten years after the events generally known as 9/11, one of the most extraordinary uses of the comics medium ever appeared in the newspaper strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.

As a practitioner of a magical/critical practice that I have coined psychochronography, it is my belief that one can position any cultural object at the center of one’s vision and, through sufficiently thorough exploration of it, understand the larger world in which it exists. To this end, I propose that we explore this genuinely astonishing work of comics art in order to understand the whole of America in the 21st century. 

Let us begin with a rigorously tight perspective, understanding the comic strictly on its own formal terms. First of all, the plot: Snuffy Smith has taken his nephew Jughaid on a walk. There is a clear sense of motion in this: the Smiths are in different locations in every panel. At a minimum, they walk the length of Ol’ Man Dowdy’s Pond, reach the base of Mount Tippy-Top (which may well lie more or less immediately at the end of the pond), and then return along the opposite bank of the pond. This theory, which we might call the Short Walk Hypothesis hinges on the idea that the tree in the final panel is the same one as the first panel, only displayed from the other side. This is supported by the fact that both trees constitute a trunk splitting into two branches, one larger and one smaller, and that the smaller one is on opposite sides of the tree in each panel. 

This hypothesis, however, requires placing a potentially undue amount of faith in the belief that John R. Rose can draw a significant enough variety of trees to make this visual comparison worthwhile. Beyond the tree, the visuals do not in fact quite line up: the shrubbery between the Smiths and the tree in the final panel does not appear to exist on the far bank of the first panel, while the shrubbery that is visible in the first panel is not visible in the last. This would seem to point towards what we might call the Long Walk Hypothesis, in which the Smiths’ journey constitutes a more extensive traversal of Hootin’ Holler akin to the famous carriage tour of London in chapter four Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, in which William Gull, the figure Moore chooses to pin the Jack the Ripper murders on, directs a coach tour of London in which he explains a mystical history of London in a manner familiar to practitioners of psychogeography. Similarly, Snuffy’s account of his grief constituting an extended allegorical narrative related as he and Jughaid visit various physically disparate landmarks.

The Long Walk Hypothesis raises significant questions about the passage of time, however. Snuffy’s lecture simply does not seem to be long enough to play out over an entire day, hence the temptation towards the Short Walk Hypothesis.…

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