User:ModernDayTrilobite/John R. Rose

John R. Rose (born 1963) is an American cartoonist. He is best known as the third and current author of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.

Early life
Rose was born in Covington, Virginia in 1963, and also spent parts of his childhood in Manassas. He studied art and art history at James Madison University, where he also published cartoons in the school's newspaper. Rose met Mike Peters while Peters held a lecture at his university, an encounter which helped motivate Rose to enter the cartooning field himself.

Editorial cartoons
After graduating college in 1986, Rose began his professional cartooning career as a freelance sports cartoonist. He was hired by Virginia's Byrd Newspapers group in 1988, initially as an editorial cartoonist at the Warren Sentinel, and in 1993 he was promoted to art director of The Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Rose has published one collection of his editorial cartoons, the 1996 volume Cartoons That Fit the Bill: An Editorial Cartoon Collection About Washington and Beyond.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith
In 1998, Rose was hired as an assistant on Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, where he worked as an inker under Fred Lasswell. After Lasswell's death in March 2001, Rose became the lead author of the strip.

Rose's tenure on Barney Google and Snuffy Smith has incorporated the centennial of the strip's publication, which occurred on June 17, 2019. Rose celebrated the anniversary with a two-week storyline that highlighted major characters from throughout the strip's run, as well as other long-running characters like Dagwood Bumstead and Popeye.

Other ventures
Since 1991, Rose has authored a weekly activity page called the Kids' Home Newspaper. He has also served as a writer and inker for Archie Comics.

Awards and honors
In 2015, the National Lum and Abner Society granted Rose the Lum and Abner Memorial Award, in recognition of his "contributions to rural humor". Rose's editorial cartoons have received awards from the National Newspaper Association and Virginia Press Association.

Rose also received a "Best Use of Humor in an Ad" award from the Tennessee Press Association, for an advertisement titled "Snuff Out Wildfires Before They Start".