In my recent look at at Harry Lucey’s work, I somehow didn’t manage to link to a Lucey-drawn story that is particularly memorable, though for all the wrong reasons. In the February 1964 issue, Archie unveiled a story that is so inappropriate for so many reasons that no one who read it (at the time or in a digest) can seem to forget it.
The art was by Lucey, and this (early ’60s) was my favorite period for his work, lots of great acting from the guys and girls, suspense when needed, and some crazy throwaway gags like the two guys hiding behind one small tree at the same time (on the second panel of p. 5). But there’s so much that’s disturbing in this story, intentionally and unintentionally, that it would take practically another post to list them all. But here’s the story, and then I’ll try and list some of the WTF?! aspects.
“The Kisser Strikes!” (11 pages) from Archie # 143, February 1964
So, first off, this story itself probably wasn’t as WTF-ish at the time as it seems now. “Kissing Bandit” stories had been done before and would be done again. And I have to admit, Archie’s explanation of Betty’s actions made sense to me as a kid (who wouldn’t want to create a mystery that no one could solve?). Still, what it comes down to is that you’ve got a story about Betty running around kissing all the girls in school. Then you’ve got:
– A comedy story that starts with Veronica, alone and defenseless at night, about to be assaulted by a scary figure coming out of the shadows.
– The venerable “girls who are taken by force really like it” stereotype, one that was by no means confined to Archie comics, of course. Still, when you have girls talking about the person who’s jumping out of the shadows and grabbing them, it may be ill-advised to have a girl suggest they do “Nothing drastic, like stopping him, I hope!”
– Reggie to Archie: “Are you trying to say that Jughead kissed you?”
– Not really WTF, but there were sure some odd-looking hairstyles in 1964. (But then, there are odd-looking hairstyles in every decade, and Archie artists drew them all.)
– Did I mention that in order to kiss Midge, Betty puts a paper bag over Midge’s head? And that Midge considers it a mark of pride to have been assaulted in this manner, because “I’ve joined the club!”
– Archie and Reggie ask the weirdest-haired of the previously-unknown girls to go out walking alone at night to make the mysterious maniac assault her, because, as they so delicately put it, “You’ll be the lure to make him strike!”
– Jughead really, really seems to want it to be known that he didn’t kiss Archie.
– Finally, and this is way creepier than her decision to go around kissing girls just for the sake of pure mischief: Betty only seems to kiss Archie while he’s unconscious. First it’s after he’s knocked out by a branch. Second it’s when she thinks he’s asleep. So her modus operandi is that when she’s kissing girls for the sake of creating a mystery, she can do that while they’re awake. But the kiss of true love must wait until the beloved is out cold.
That, you must surely admit, is a lot o’ WTF to pack into one story. Even a two-parter.
Related Articles
31 users responded in this post
Wow. Just…wow. Riverdale high was just one big bisexual orgy in 1964, apparently.
It was a simpler time.
Release a comic like that today and you’d have one group of nutters screaming about how this comic is worse than a million actual rapes, another group of nutters suggesting that Archie – when combined with Teletubies – completes the magic formula that turns people gay, every Kate Perry fan raiding the news stand to buy a copy, and headline CNN news coverage for a week.
Zifnab- c’mon now, you give comics to much credit. There was a relatively big shakeup in the comics community when the chameleon may or may not have raped Peter Parker’s not-girlfriend. Was that covered by any major news outlet, or spoken of by any website not focused on comics?
Release a comic like that today and you’d have one group of nutters screaming about how this comic is worse than a million actual rapes,
Yes, it’s so much worse when nutters are oversensitive about rape than it is when mainstream comic artists write and widely distribute stories that perpetuate the idea that sexual assault is fun, whimsical, and a compliment.
It was a simpler time. A time to be nostalgic about. A more desirable time, when we could talk about rape in abstract terms and people didn’t get all upset about it. You know, before those nutters who disapprove of rape went and ruined everything with their lack of appreciation for Great Art like this old Archie comic.
The problem is when you hold up an Archie comic as the lead on Nancy Grace, then have a piece defending Roman Polanski as a nice fellow who just got in a silly mix up at a cocktail party.
There’s a huge double standard between depicted acts and actual crimes. The depicted acts are held to a much higher standard.
Archie was pretty quick to discount Jughead as the culprit after getting kissed. I wanted him to just own up and say “No, Jughead doesn’t kiss like that.”
@Laura
Except that they’re shooting themselves in the foot when they do it. When you start getting oversensitive about something, people stop taking you seriously. Screaming about how this comic is worse than actual rape doesn’t make people think critically about the message; it just makes them think you’re a nutter who needs to get laid. If you want them to listen, you need to calmly point out that there’s something wrong with this kind of attitude and respect their right to disagree. And even if they do disagree, they’ll still think about later. They might even decide you had a point after all. But come across as crazy, and that’s all you’ll be remembered as.
Interestingly enough, the purification of Archie Comics only started about the time the earliest Archie readers (‘tweens back in 1944) started having their kids enter adolescence…
The entire story might be a parody on the “Mad Gasser of Mattoon;” however, those events occurred in 1944. Makes you wonder if a newspaper did a 20 year after story and the artist saw it and decided to use it.
Except it’s reminiscent of spike Milligan’s Punch Up The Conker episode of the Goon Show, or Spike Milligan’s Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town for the Two Ronnies. It’s an old gag, Archie being a comic that focuses on teen relationships in a small, 1950’s themed version of the brigadoon village, naturally went with the slightly rapey variation.
Screaming about how this comic is worse than actual rape doesn’t make people think critically about the message
And if people had argued that, then that would have been… really hyperbolic.
If you get this upset over hyperbole on the internet you have some quite large problems.
Except it’s reminiscent of spike Milligan’s Punch Up The Conker episode of the Goon Show, or Spike Milligan’s Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town for the Two Ronnies.
Or Milligan and the Goons’ “The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler.” Milligan really did like that plot.
One more WTF to add to the list: The sound effects used to describe kissing.I mean come on, “smeerp?” WTF?
You put the accent on the second “e”, Karellan. ;D
Yet more proof that not only is Betty psychotic, she also swings both ways.
Wrath,
you got it backward. It’s not because the people who point these things out are crazy and hypersensitive that their criticism doesn’t sway people. It’s because people don’t want to examine their internalized prejudice and potentially have their self-image shattered.
See, it goes like this: “I’m a good person. Part of being a good person is not being racist/mysoginist/etc. I have written/enjoyed fiction others have accused of being racist/mysoginist/etc. That means I’m racist/mysoginist/etc.! But that would make me a bad person. But I’m a good person! Therefore this isn’t racist/mysoginist/etc. and the people accusing it of being such are just hysterical.”
And then this person looks for confirmation by searching for genuinely crazy rethoric on the side of the critics, finds it and moves on. After all, there are crazy people in any group, and it doesn’t matter how reasonable and articulate 95% the critics are, people will latch on to the crazy 5%
Case in point: Bra-burning. “Bra-burner” is a pretty mainstream synonym for feminist, yet when you actually look for feminists who burned bras in the sixties you’re going to come up nearly empty-handed. It’s something that may or may not have been done at one demonstration.
See also, for example, Bendis trying to defend himself from charges of sexism, without trying to confront any inner sexism. I can practically see him chanting “But I’m a good person, but I’m a good person…”
See, we’re all sexist and racist and ableist and every other -ist there is. How could we not be? We grow up in a cultural that is steeped in -isms. What people have to realize is that it doesn’t make them bad people to recognize this in themselves – provided one makes an effort to, having recognized an instant of an -ism, to change. But you can’t change if you don’t first recognize this flaw within. Pretending it isn’t there isn’t going to make it go away.
I’m not saying that there are no cases of hypersensitivity – sometimes people looking for sexism will find it where there is none or where it’s deeply subjective. But again, that usually falls into the crazy 5%. I’ve been part of the feminist blogosphere for a really long time and it’s so maddening – there’s so much good, intelligent, eye-opening commentary out there. Made me confront a lot of my inner prejudices and, in fact, made me a better person. And people will see it’s a “Feminazi” blog, make their judgement based on that and then accuse you of man-hating, being too sensitive, too shrill, too everything, with no textual support from the original topic whatsoever. Honestly, you haven’t been trolled until you’ve been trolled by anti-feminists…
I mean, just look at what you wrote!
“Screaming about how this comic is worse than actual rape doesn’t make people think critically about the message…”
Please point me to where critics have described comics with similiar messages as this one as “worse than rape”. Seeing how it’s been my experience that a significant portion of feminists have experienced actual rape and do not treat the subject lightly (which would actually be the basis of the criticism you’re attributing this to), I find this rather unlikely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you were being hyperbolic, except not really.
Aaaand now I’m gonna step off the soap-box. Yah, sorry guys, just had a bad case of SIWOTI-syndrome…
Betty Cooper was not the inventor of girl-kissing, but was the first to realize it helped getting ahead of the line at the rope at the local malt shop.
R-Tam: Er, what you said.
Please find more Bisexual Betty stories to bring to our attention.
And Harry Lucie was the king of strange hairstyles. I remember his later stories when everyone was tall and lanky. Reggie had wavy hair, Jughead’s hair- the two bits that stick out from under the crown- seemed longer and had a weird shape, and Betty had this weird style that was flat and smooth on top, and then flared out in this wild, spiky mess on the lower half of her head.
Not to mention: “Jughead is the last guy in the world who’d be caught kissing *a girl!*” (emphasis in original)
The implication is so explicit it makes me wonder if it was intentional, even.
@R-Tam: Well put.
@R-Tam
“significant portion”
Are you comfortable with stating a percentage?
Midge isn’t that bad-looking in that cartoon. And you’d think the girls would notice that the person kissing them isn’t a guy somehow, wouldn’t you?
If not, that’s understandable. Instead, perhaps, you could state at what point the portion of raped women would have become insignificant?
R-Tam:
Read a little Peggy Noonan or Mauren Dowd, and you’ll get an earful of “save the children” rhetoric ranging from violent video games to nudity in film to those vulgar rape lyrics.
Read a little farther and you’ll hear plenty of apologia for the Roman Polanski rape, or excuses for torture by military contractors, or a stirring defense of John McCain’s “Bomb bomb bomb Iran” remix.
Media is held to a higher standard than real people. An episode of 24 will receive more detailed analysis and cultural criticism than an Attorney General’s report regarding Gitmo prisoner treatment (with the former often spurred by the release of the latter).
I can’t show you a good example in comics, but I can show you one in regards to “The Vagina Monologues”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vagina_Monologues#Social_conservative_criticism
A good example of a conservative columnist more than happy to protest media. I’ll leave determining his stance on Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, on the Patriot Act, on Gitmo, on military contractor abuses overseas, on warantless wiretaps, police use of tasers, feminists, and the rest as an exercise to the reader.
And for those asking “WTF does Iraq/Afghanistan have to do with rape?”
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/07/kbr-rape-franken-amendment/
I’ll also happily link you to the still-ongoing GOP endorsed Nipple Slip controversy going through the FCC.
@R-Tam
I mean, just look at what you wrote!
“Screaming about how this comic is worse than actual rape doesn’t make people think critically about the message…”
Please point me to where critics have described comics with similiar messages as this one as “worse than rape”. Seeing how it’s been my experience that a significant portion of feminists have experienced actual rape and do not treat the subject lightly (which would actually be the basis of the criticism you’re attributing this to), I find this rather unlikely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you were being hyperbolic, except not really.
I was replying to Laura’s reply to Zifnab, who made this throwaway comment (at least, I read it as throwaway): Release a comic like that today and you’d have one group of nutters screaming about how this comic is worse than a million actual rapes
I wasn’t saying that people actually said those things. I’m just against defending the attitude. Maybe I do have it backwards, or maybe we’re both right. Either way, acting like a nutter can only harm the cause.
Woah. Just reread my comment and, holy shit, look at the typos. In my defense, I was very, very tired when I wrote that. I can haz proofreading?
Sivi & njs: Thanks 😀
@q
I’m really not.
Conventional wisdom has it 1 in 4 women has been raped or nearly raped. It’s hard to find accurate statistics since rape is a severely underreported crime.
So, yeah, significant portion among women have been raped, and feminists are (sadly) mostly women (how fucked up is it that feminism is “woman’s work”? I think very much so). And it becomes significant because as a result feminists take rape and rape jokes very seriously indeed. (Trigger warning) So, back to my original point, they’re unlikely to proclaim something “worse than rape”.
Zifnab
Hrm, I generally sort most of conservative commentary under “nutters”, so yeah… I think we had a little failure of communication here. When you thought of the people likely to call it “worse than a million rapes” you were thinking of conservatives aka the family values/decency/THINK OF THE CHILDREN! crowd, while I thought the likely critics would be feminists attacking the rape culture, which made me think you were going for the zOMG humorless/hypersensitive feminists! shot.
So…since you’re not going to see me defending reactionaries, I don’t really have anything to say. Huh.
Wrath
You’re right, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have attributed it to you. Zifnab, consider that part of the comment aimed at you. Except not really, because you were talking about conservatives. Umm… Retracted, then.
And yeah, nutters harm the cause. The sky is also, in fact, blue. And focusing on the nutters when they’re not actually represantative of the norm of said cause is dishonest.
Ah, damn, q, I misread. Insignificant, got it. Poor word choice on my part. I meant “significant number” in the numerical sense. I was NOT implying that a low number of raped women would be “insignificant”. Even one rape in a million is one too many.
@ Mary Warner: so, you’d like to see more bisexual Betty, huh?
@ Sofa King: indeed, you’d think the girls might get some sort of sense that their kisser’s not a guy, but apparently not…
Not the sub-header I would have picked…
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/16006.html
…but it does make me long for the days of Improved Archie.
[…] there’s a kind of mad brilliance. A few Silver Age comics are full-blown masterpieces of repressed urges and fantasies.11 (You have to wonder, looking at them, whether the creators behind them knew what they were […]