See you in the funny pages: Elizabeth Sandifer's America a Prophecy

 Of course, one of the difficulties for a blog like this, in deciding to provide a deliberate counterpoint to the turgid, manufactured displays of national mourning with which our broadcasters are bombarding us by focusing on mirthful subjects is, well, mirth isn't really something we do that often round these parts. Polemic, analysis, and a certain waspish sarcasm, yes, but we're rarely what you'd call laugh-out-loud funny. But there are ways of addressing humour as a topic without yourself being a comedian. Though as it happens, the subject of today's entry, the latest instalment of Elizabeth Sandifer's blog series America a Prophecy, is a great example of writing about humour seriously while also being extremely funny. 

Snuffy Smith as psychogeographic psychopath

America a Prophecy is a blog series, published yearly, interrogating the contents of a single instalment of the US syndicated newspaper comics strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, by John Rose, which ran as part of a commemoration of the 9/11 attacks called Cartoonists Remember 9/11. As Sandifer explains, this saw 'a total of ninety-five ongoing newspaper strips set aside their Sunday strip to respond to the memory of 9/11'. The first instalment was published ten years after the strip's original publication, on the eleventh of September 2021. The second instalment went live this past Sunday. The next will reach us on 9/11/23. 

It would be the easiest thing in the world to simply mine these comical commemorations for cheap laughs, given that, as Sandifer explains, 'what this meant in practice was that Sunday comics sections were filled wall to wall with mawkish and poorly designed 9/11 strips', but that publishing schedule should be your clue that the kind of laughs she's interested in are more expensive. Here, though, I will take any opportunity for a cheap gag (especially when it gives me an excuse to break up the text with an image) so here, as an example of the kind of thing which ran as part of Cartoonists Remember 9/11, is the Todd the Dinosaur strip commemorating that fateful day: 

It helps to consider America a Prophecy alongside Sandifer's other major projects, especially the one which has probably been referred to the most in the course of recent entries, TARDIS Eruditorum, which will henceforth be referred to as TE to save time. TE is one of the most remarkable works of pop-cultural criticism ever undertaken by one person: a 'psychochronography' of the beloved BBC television show Doctor Who in all its forms, from its first episode in 1963 to the end of the Peter Capaldi era (and beyond: subscribers to Sandifer's Patreon can enjoy her thoughts on the Whittaker era before they go up on the main Eruditorum Press site). Sandifer explains psychochronography as the 'position[ing of] any cultural object at the centre of one's vision' to 'through sufficiently thorough exploration...understand the larger world in which it exists'. 

Thus, TE tells not just the ongoing story of the Doctor and their regenerations, but also the larger story of the country and world in which Doctor Who was produced and enjoyed, the changing nature of its fan reception, the changes in the media by which it was produced, and the media around it. Lots of people will tell you the superficial effects the arrival of Star Wars in 1977 had on Doctor Who: Sandifer can discuss what they mean, both in terms of the show and its wider culture. And because Sandifer is very upfront about the fact that psychochronography, like psychogeography, is both a critical and a magical practice, it sometimes goes to very odd places: the entry for Logopolis, Tom Baker's televisual swansong as the Fourth Doctor, takes the form of a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' story based on the Kabbalah. 

Doccy Who references, of course, mean we have an excuse to shoehorn Soldeed and Janet Ellis into yet another entry

So America a Prophecy is an attempt to prove the validity of the psychochronographic method by focusing on an ultra-limited text: a single instalment of a single newspaper strip, as opposed to the sprawling multimedia entity that is Doctor Who. But by setting it in its contexts, it's already clear from two instalments that Sandifer is going to be able to mine this single strip for a lot of insights about the culture that produced it (the title for the next instalment, 'The Only Thing that Stops a Bad Guy with an Emotion is a Good Guy with an Emotion', makes me wish I didn't have to wait a year to read it): the latest instalment, setting the strip in its broader context of the history of newspaper comic strips, taught me a load of stuff I never knew about that medium. 

And as I say, it's also extremely funny. Wisely, Sandifer foregrounds this aspect in the opening of the first entry, setting up an initial tension between what she calls the Short Walk and Long Walk Hypotheses in terms of describing the diegetic peregrinations of the titular Snuffy Smith and his interlocutor Jughaid, before setting up the more serious non-diegetic dichotomy of how the story presents Snuffy's grief for those lost on 9/11. It reminds me a lot of this classic Stewart Lee routine, in which Lee uses set theory to deconstruct the classic hymn 'All Things Bright and Beautiful', written by Cecil Frances Alexander and usually set to the tune of the same name by William Henry Monk - a deconstruction which, like Sandifer's close-reading of the Snuffy Smith strip, hinges on an ironic reading of the source material: 

And actually, now that we've mentioned Stewart Lee...