America a Prophecy 6: From Mothman to Bob Murray (A Study in Appalachian Monstrosity)

Part six of an annual blog series on the worst comic ever created.

Every year I write an essay about the 9/11/2011 installment Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. Thus far they’ve included Exegesis, The Devolution of the Funny Pages 1895-2022, The Only Thing That Stops a Bad Guy with an Emotion is a Good Guy with an Emotion, Rose, and The Goo-Goo-Googly Eyes. That last installment went back to the beginning, looking at the origins of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith back in 1919. This year, though, let’s go even further back and look at the origins of the Appalachian milieu in which the comic is set. 

These date back some 1.2 billion years earlier than Billy DeBeck’s creation of Barney Google, and, for that matter, than Johannes Gutenberg’s creation of the printing press, when the supercontinent of Rodinia formed, resulting in the Grenville orogeny. This was followed over the next nine hundred million years or so with the Taconic, Acadian, and Alleghanian orogenies, the latter of these coming when Laurussia and Gondwana collided to form Pangea. The resulting mountain range split with the breaking of Pangea, with pieces existing in the Scottish highlands and the Atlas mountains of Morocco, but the largest segment ran up the eastern seaboard of North America, from the north of Alabama and Mississippi all the way up into New Brunswick. In the 16th century white settlers encountered an indigenous tribe whose name they romanized as the Apalchen. The Spanish later changed this to the Apalachee, and the name was eventually adopted for the mountains the tribe lived in, while the tribe itself was ultimately genocided out of existence. 

Culturally speaking, however, Appalachia typically refers to a smaller portion of the range beginning in northern Georgia and stretching up through eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, western North Carolina (where Hootin’ Holler is canonically located) and Virginia, and encompassing more or less the entirety of West Virginia. This region roughly coincides with the territory controlled by the Cherokee prior to their forced displacement along the Trail of Tears, allowing the region to be resettled by white Europeans, largely Scotch-Irish and German immigrants. The realities of mountain living in the 18th century meant that the people who settled there tended towards the rugged frontiersmen types—think Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett—resulting in the stereotypical image of the coonskin-capped Appalachian in buckskin leather, as embodied by Jughaid in the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip. 

But Jughaid, and indeed Snuffy Smith in general point at another key aspect of Appalachia, or perhaps more accurately of how Appalachia is perceived externally. Hootin’ Holler is just one example of a larger genre of what might be termed yokel humor. DeBeck was, as mentioned, cribbing from the successful Li’l Abner in even coming up with the idea, but it can also be found in sitcoms like The Andy Griffith Show, Green Acres, or, in an admittedly different form, in movies like Deliverance. Whether for horror or for comedy, the basic mechanism is the same, with the residents of Appalachia being exoticized as strange grotesques untethered to civilization, improper and shameful. 

This is only one strand of Appalachia’s cultural status, however; it’s also a primary nexus for American folklore. The legendary John Henry is said to have won his fatal race with a steam drill constructing the Big Bend Tunnel near Talcott, West Virginia, for instance, while historically extant figures like Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed both prominently intersect the region. Part of this is explainable by the fact that the region also has a vibrant musical tradition from which what’s these days recognized as country music emerged. This tradition included clear roots in the British folk music tradition, and particularly things like the Child ballads, resulting in a musical tradition rich with narratives of its own.

But this does not explain the other major aspect of Appalachian folklore, the absolutely astonishing number of cryptids and monsters associated with the region. There’s the Flatwoods Monster, a roughly ten foot tall “man-like figure with a round, red face surrounded by a pointed, hood-like shape” that emerged following a bright light streaking across the sky—an apparition used as a visual model for a side question The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, of all things. There’s also the Bell Witch, named for the family it haunted, which was the foundation for The Blair Witch Project. There’s even a local version of Bigfoot to be had, the Tennessee Wildman, along with a host of sub-monstrous hauntings like the Brown Mountain Lights. 

The most famous Appalachian cryptid, however, is of course Mothman, first sighted in 1966 near Point Pleasant, West Virginia. A feathered, bird-like creature with glowing red eyes, Mothman tipped into wider popular culture after paranormal researcher John A. Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies, which argued that Mothman was an extraterrestrial and also a harbinger warning the people of Point Pleasant of the impending 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River, and which was subsequently adapted into a Richard Gere movie in 2002. 

It will not escape attention that there’s a UFO vibe across many of these stories—Mothman, obviously, but also the Flatwoods Monster and the Brown Mountain Lights. Some of this is simply timing—these stories all date to the latter half of the 20th century, when UFO lore was prevalent, and so an obvious explanation for strange otherworldly creatures. But it’s still significant that the strange creatures sighted in the region all have that otherworldly tinge in the first place, in marked contrast to, say, Bigfoot, who’s generally taken to simply be a rare species of animal. Appalachian monsters come from outside, which is unsurprising given the region’s own remoteness and the way in which it’s routinely othered by those in the lowlands.

Unsurprisingly this othering also extends beyond the artistic realm and into material conditions. The yokel stereotype is not just rural but poor. And indeed, Appalachia is—in the 1960s, in fact, it was the most impoverished region in the country, with one in three people living in poverty. And this is in spite of the region’s abundant resources. Starting with the railroad boom in the late 19th century the region became a hub for both logging and the coal industry. But these industries amounted to the extraction of resources from the region, buying up the land (fully half the land in the region is owned by 1% of the residents) and setting up company towns that ensured little of the profits actually remained in the region, even as the workers suffered the environmental effects of coal mining. And these were significant. The prevalent form of mining int he region is mountaintop removal mining—a more dangerous and environmentally destructive form of mining that literally rips open the tops of mountains and hollows them out. Why? Because it’s cheaper, of course. And even as the American coal industry declines rapidly, the coal baron archetype remains. The most famous modern example is probably Bob Murray, but he’s notable less because his union-busting and safety record was particularly egregious than because he got into a fight with the comedian John Oliver and ended up becoming a laughingstock. 

It would be a mistake to treat the political reaction to this poverty as in any way uniform. Appalachia was a hotbed for the early labor movement, as embodied in the classic union song “Which Side Are You On,” about the decade long Harlan County War between union organizers and the fully deputized goon squad hired by the coal barons—a conflict that saw eighteen dead and the Kentucky National Guard eventually called in to break the strike before county sheriff J.H. Blair rescinded the right to assemble, And the tradition of rural leftism continues to this day through Appalachia-based activists like Margaret Killjoy.

Nevertheless, this is plainly not the dominant strand. Pull up a county-level map of the 2024 election and Appalachia stands out as a nearly unbroken band of red. And this is not the red of a closely fought district, but rather where you find places like Clay County, Kentucky and Scott County, Tennessee, where Trump racked up eighty point margins. There is no longer need to ask which side you’re on in Harlan County; Trump took 88% of the vote. 

This is, of course, the way that it goes. The economic decay following wealth’s extraction leads to a larger rot. The same anger that makes a union man stand up to J.H. Blair’s armed thugs can just as easily be turned towards fascism’s eternal grievance campaign. But such extreme rot in the core of America’s mythic landscape is both remarkable and ominous.

In the Spring of 1974, right in the middle of Fred Laswell’s tenure on Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, a woman named Alice Moore arrived at a meeting of the Kanawha County Board of Education in Charleston, West Virginia. She had been elected to the board on an anti-sex education platform, and was there to vote on the purchase of some three hundred and twenty-five books for use in the public school system from kindergarten all the way up to the twelfth grade. Moore, to the surprise of her fellow board members, objected to the purchase, and persuaded the board to order copies of the books for review first. Moore quickly found things to object to, railing against passages from The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Allen Ginsberg, and quickly enlisting the help of Educational Research Analysts, a fundamentalist Christian group of self-appointed textbook watchdogs, along with a splash of local media attention.

There was, of course, a huge racial dimension to this. The textbooks were being adopted in the first place to comply with a state directive that students should be provided with multicultural literature. And on top of Moore’s objections to Malcolm X were complaints Eldidge Cleaver and George Jackson. Indeed, her initial objection to the curriculum was its use of the term “dialectology,” claiming—incorrectly—that this would involve teaching white students “to speak in ghetto dialect.” And this similarly played out in the protests, where books written by Black authors were routinely described with slurs.

The textbooks were ultimately approved in spite of Moore’s objections, but her campaign didn’t stop. Flyers with entirely invented quotations from the purchased books were plastered around town, and when parents failed to find the quotes in the textbooks they accused teachers of hiding the real books from them. The Ku Klux Klan held a four hour rally in the county threatening that the school board could “remove the textbooks or we’ll remove you from office—physically.” The situation escalated to the point where elementary schools were being banned. The movement failed to actually get the textbooks removed, but it was still the first major proof of concept test of the modern evangelical movement’s political methodology—a dry run not only for the fascist takeover of the country fifty years later.

If language is a virus from outer space, what are we to make of an illiteracy crisis from the home of the Brown Mountain Lights? And what does this have to do with Ol’ Man Dowdy’s Pond? 

It is worth noting the common theme here. The newspaper comic strip that degenerates from the full page splendors of Winsor McCay and George Herriman into the vapid pointlesness of the modern form. The empty sentiment of patriotic glurge. The political non-thought of John Rose’s editorial cartoons. The vast depth of those Goo-Goo-Googly sockets. Now this—Appalachia as ground zero of the illiteracy crisis, a rotting crater bigger than any blown-out mountain peak. Over and over we find these cavernous nothings—these vast abyssal edifices of non-culture. And then, of course, there is the hole left in Snuffy Smith’s heart by the victims of 9/11.

Shall we peer inside?

Next: Does It Need Holes?