Jaime found this and passed it along:

It’s the blissful expression on Betty’s face, combined with the sheer terror on Archie’s, that really sells the last panel. Her parents are away on a weekend vacation. Jughead is in Shelbyville at a chess tournament. Veronica is distracted, thanks to tipping off Reggie that Archie would be “otherwise occupied.” Moose and Dilton are useless. Archie is all hers, and as she lies glibly to Ronnie, she knows at last the sweet taste of triumph.

Okay, so let’s say I told you that in 1964, a comic book character was so out of control that the doctor prescribed tranquilizers. Let’s also say that this character started taking the tranquilizers and immediately became prone to narcolepsy. And let’s throw in the fact that even in a state of drug-induced narcolepsy, this person couldn’t stop stalking two other characters and making their lives miserable. Which character do you think I’m talking about?

I’ll give you three gu… aw, hell, you’ve guessed it already, haven’t you (click on thumbnails to read the pages).

The story more or less speaks for itself. Well, the ending might need a bit of explanation. Suffice it to say that tranquilizers, sedatives and other knock-out pills were at the height of popularity in the early ’60s. So a comic book about two teenagers choosing to take someone else’s clearly dangerous prescription drugs? Not a problem. I mean, it’s not like they’re drinking beer or something.

And a question for experts on Betty Cooper’s mental state: do you think her doctor prescribed this incredibly strong medication because he was trying to take her out of commission, or is this just the dosage she prefers?

Finally, those who like spotting hidden messages in old comics might note the names and initials on the bench:

“Dan” and “Josie” are Dan DeCarlo and his wife (yes, that’s where he got the name) while “Rudy” and “Mary” are DeCarlo’s inker Rudy Lapick and his wife. “Harry” is probably Harry Lucey. And LBJ might or might not be a politician of some kind. That one’s for comics historians to decide.

You know what surprises me about remakes in comic books? It’s that there haven’t been more of them. Formula or no formula, there does usually seem to be a presumption that a new script is better than re-illustrating an old one from a decade earlier. Which is a good thing; I’m just not sure if it reflects integrity or the fear that someone might notice. Anyway, Archie comics had surprisingly few out-and-out remakes for a franchise where a lot of the stories kind of feel like remakes. But there have been a few exceptions, starting with two versions of one script that told us the same thing: if you don’t learn a foreign language, people will die.

The first time this script appeared was in 1960, in Archie # 114, a story that inspired one of the most famous Harry Lucey covers (Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi, a Lucey admirer, featured it in his blog’s Lucey cover gallery.) The company at this time was going through one of their very brief flirtations with having the cover actually be related to the stories inside, instead of being a stand-alone gag…

…but, like most such covers, it gives a false impression of what’s going to happen; we think Archie’s going to be arrested, but then we open the book and find:

A five-page story called “The Interpreter,” also with art by Harry Lucey; click here to read it.

Pretty straightforward message: you may not like studying Spanish, but you should learn it anyway. Why? Because when a kid gets hit by a car, every single other person in the crowd will have been too apathetic to learn Spanish themselves, and you’ll be literally the only one who can talk to the kid’s father and find out his blood type. That seems hard to argue with.

The story must have made an impact on someone at the company, or they just wanted to do something like it and didn’t have time to get a new script: because sometime in the late ’60s (judging by the art and clothes, it looks like 1969 or so), they did it again.

Even the title is the same: “The Interpreter.” The art is, once again, by Lucey. Click here to read “The Interpreter: The Reimaginationing.”

Archie’s R sweater and bow tie are gone and Betty is now wearing miniskirts, but the art is basically the same, though there are enough new poses to suggest that it was re-drawn rather than just re-inked from the old drawings. (I’m sorry that I couldn’t get them side-by-side for direct comparisons.) Lucey, who was an excellent superhero/action artist and is credited with having done some Captain America work in the ’40s, still draws the authority figures (the cop, the surgeon) in a less cartoony style than usual. But what we learn primarily is that despite all the social upheaval between the beginning and end of the ’60s, there’s still no one except Archie who can speak Spanish.

Now, as I said, comic books wouldn’t normally dust off an old script and do it verbatim; they’d do a similar story with a new script. And that’s what they did sometime in the mid-’70s, in the adventure-laden world of Life With Archie (I don’t know which issue). The script is identifiable as the tireless Frank Doyle — basically, if someone says “EEP!” it’s probably him — but the art this time is by Stan Goldberg.

The story, called “Something of Value,” runs eight pages, and can be read here.

The art is streets ahead of what Goldberg is turning out now, though I much prefer Lucey’s take on the characters, and you notice that his use of very prominent face lines is already getting out of hand: on page 6, panel 3, it makes Veronica look weird. But the art is not all that’s changed. Now there’s a new reason for learning Spanish. Not because a kid will get hit by a car, but because a hemophiliac kid will get a cut and you will be the only one who knows he isn’t a sissy for getting upset. And whereas in the ’60s it was reward enough to “be proud of yourself,” in the ’70s, that’s just not enough unless you also get a big kiss from the kid’s hot older sister.

But here’s where it gets strange. What’s Archie Comics’ attitude towards other languages besides Spanish? Well, as this late ’50s story from Wilbur (written by Doyle, art by Dan DeCarlo) will show, it’s extremely negative.

According to the comics, and contradicting everything I was told in the Ontario school system, French has no practical use whatsoever, and even people who speak French don’t actually care about teaching it, they just want to score with younger boys.

So, to review: if you don’t learn Spanish, the blood of dead children is on your hands. But watch out for French. It’s dangerous.

In lieu of a somewhat more substantive post that I’m still tinkering with, here’s a 1964 comic book story whose Cold War origins have always confused me. Not that it’s confusing that a science fiction story would be about the Cold War; what else was it going to be about? The question is, who’s who in this particular Cold War conflict.

• The story is called “A Quiet Weekend In the Country” (by the subject of my longest-ever MGK post, Bob Bolling), and it can be read by clicking here.

(I decided to stop trying to YouTube stories; breaking this story up into its separate panels would ruin some of the effects — like the the “circle” bit at the top of page 9, the comics equivalent of the way a movie cuts from an exterior to an interior and back again.)

Now, okay, the Cold War markers are fairly clear, as you would expect in a science fiction story from the year that Mad Men will soon get to. You’ve got Planet Zentrox, the thriving tourist-friendly place, vs. Planet Glob, the ugly, drab conformist hellhole where everybody looks alike. The President of Zentrox even has a teenage daughter; she’s called Zeena instead of “Lynda Bird” or “Lucy Baines,” but we still get the point. Just in case we’re wondering what this is about, we get this rather late in the story:

But the weird thing about this Cold War story is that the bad guys are religious bad guys, who are defeated when our hero exploits their doctrine and makes them think that God is displeased with them. So in allegorical terms, the story seems to present the Globs as God-fearing Communists whose religious belief renders their military might useless.

The message of the story, apparently, is this: The side that believes in tourism, sports cars and construction work will win out over the side that’s held back by religion. Provided, of course, that Little Archie gets abducted by aliens and shows up to help, but he gets abducted by aliens all the time, and occasionally finds aliens in his refrigerator, so it was inevitable that he’d be involved in any interplanetary conflict.

Now, my guess would be that this plot might come from an earlier science fiction story or film, the way Bolling’s “Plesiosaur” is inspired by Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn.” If I knew what the inspiration was, the point of the Zentrox-vs.-Glob conflict might be a bit clearer. (One of the reasons I did this post was that I figured someone might know what this is based on.) But as it is, the way the story reads for me, it’s like the Godless capitalists beat the religious planet.

As to how Little Archie Andrews managed to get the entire planet made over in so short a time… he can do pretty much anything. Even at this age, he’s already begun to have an inexplicable magnetism for women:

Wait in line, Lynda Bird Zeena. Wait in line.

Finally, for a lighter side of Bolling and outer space, I wanted to throw in a (somewhat late) reciprocal link to Doug Gray and the classic 1959 story “The Shrimp From Outer Space.”

Gray’s blog, The Greatest Ape, collects stories by non-superhero comics masters like Barks, Bolling, Kelly, John Stanley (Little Lulu) and Al Wiseman (Dennis the Menace). You can spend a lot of time reading the great material there, but it’s time well spent.

The year is 1958. The month is June. The teenagers of small-town America are filled with a nebulous sense of rebellion against repressive sexuality and social convention. It was inevitable that some business genius would make money off their forbidden longings. A proto-beatnik named Forsythe P. Jones opens his own “escort service,” which involves not only renting himself out to all the women of Riverdale, but wearing any disguise that suits their kinky fantasies. He even tries to expand the business by taking on Reginald Mantle as a sort of junior gigolo, to take up with women who are too scary for the boss to handle himself.

I’ve once again done the embeddable YouTube video thing, but some of the panels are hard to read in this format, so you can also click here to see the story with the original page layouts. (For those who care about such things, Archie comics had a lot more panels in the late ’50s and early ’60s than they had before or after. Sometime in the ’60s most of their artists switched to a rule whereby there couldn’t be more than six panels per page.)

Also, an important principle that Dan DeCarlo followed in his ’50s prime was that girls’ skirts must be flowing in the breeze whenever possible. Riverdale must have been some windy town.

One thing I’ve been wondering for years is whether “It sounds creamy!” was actually a slang phrase of the time or if it’s just a vaguely dirty-sounding substitute for “dreamy.”

I don’t think any comic book of the ’70s had as much insane shit in it as Archie at Riverdale High. And that’s saying a lot, because we are talking about the ’70s here. But this title, launched in the early ’70s as a home for “serious” stories focusing on academic or athletic issues, packed an impressive number of WTF moments into its bi-monthly issues. You could pick up an issue at random and find: Archie beats up the members of a rival school when they “touch his body with a Central High towel”; a famous painter agrees to paint Mr. Weatherbee on condition that Archie will pose for him in the nude (which he does); Archie infiltrates another rival high school in drag; Archie uses special-effects technology to convince everyone that a kid is actually a superpowered alien named “Nazda.” Many of these stories were also full of floridly melodramatic captions, a possible throwback to Frank Doyle’s early days writing and drawing “Space Rangers” and “Wambi, the Jungle Boy”.

You can make an argument for the higher weirdness quotient of Life With Archie, where Archie spent the ’70s battling Satanic, child-murdering teddy bears, but that title always had fantasy/alternate-universe stuff. But what happens to a kid’s brain when he picks up a comic about high school adventures and is treated to a story like this one, where Betty loses her memory, wanders off and becomes a mud wrestler? And then the only way for Archie and Jughead to save her is for Jughead to disguise himself as a woman, and what is it with this title and men in drag, anyway?

I turned this into an embeddable YouTube video because it’s just easier to post that way. The Hector Berlioz music is just meant to speed the story along and the choice is not of any significance, though I take pride in the fact that the big cymbal crash coincides with the key moment in the whole story: Jughead’s realization that Archie wants him to make The Supreme Sacrifice. Which, as I mentioned, involves drag.

That story pretty much speaks for itself. I do want to point out one thing that has haunted me since young me encountered this in a digest. Understand, I don’t believe in nit-picking the plot holes in anything, let alone comic books. Pointing out every plot hole as if each one is some kind of crippling flaw is almost as bad as pointing out every continuity goof in a movie. All that said:

This previously-unknown kid who goes to the carnival — he has to be a new kid because they couldn’t let any of their regulars willingly go to such a “sleazy outfit” — sees a girl from his school who has been missing for days, maybe weeks. His first statement after recognizing her is “I’ve got to call Archie.” I’m just saying, if this guy thinks he should call Archie before notifying the police… or her parents… or even the principal… then he is so dumb that he probably walked into an open manhole as soon as this story was over. And that explains why we never saw him again.

The other important lesson from this comic is that you can learn a lot about characters from what they say when Jughead throws them Helluva Far™. Betty says “EEP!” like all good-hearted people. Stan Snavely exclaims “AIEEE!,” like some Jonny Quest villain. That’s how we know he’s evil.

I feel this needs no further elaboration.

I can’t add much to MGK’s definitive explanations of why Betty Cooper is insane, but I just wanted to make note of one thing I found recently. When I called MGK’s attention to the first page of this story, I hadn’t actually seen the rest of the story. And I assumed that if I ever saw the original context, it would make Betty’s behaviour look less — what’s the word — terrifying and homicidal. I mean, Archie comics have done a lot of WTF stories over the years, but they wouldn’t actually build a six-page comedy story around their readership’s favourite character trying to murder the hero, would they?

But I recently happened to see that story (”Woman Scorned” from Archie # 156, July 1965), and, in fact, that first page was exactly what it looked like: the introduction to a six-page story where Betty goes bonkers and attempts to rub Archie out (not in the good way) in retaliation for a broken date. Moreover, the story establishes that Betty doesn’t care whether innocent bystanders get hurt, that Jughead is the only person who is fully aware of her violent insanity (and therefore has sense enough to be scared to death of her), that the only remorse Betty feels is over her failure to finish Archie off, that when she’s happy, she’s even more dangerous, and that Archie is an idiot. Okay, that last one may have been established elsewhere.

Here’s a link to the complete story (click on the thumbnails to read the pages).

So basically, Harry Lucey and Frank Doyle (I don’t know for sure that he wrote it, but he’s the likeliest guess for any Archie story that’s actually funny) confirmed every theory their future readers would ever have about Betty’s mental state. I don’t know whether to feel good or bad about this; it’s like finding a Silver Age Superman story where they actually tell you that Superman is a dick.

One separate thing I wanted to note here, because it can’t really sustain a full post, is that a way to tell the well-written Archie stories from the poorly-written ones is that the well-written ones usually have a joke on the first page, if not the first panel. Frank Doyle in particular would almost always try to have something funny on the first page, even if it was just a throwaway line of dialogue. Bad comedy stories in comics — not just from Archie, obviously, but from any company — tend to use the first page and even the second for nothing but exposition. Which, when you’ve only got six pages, means that a hefty chunk of the story has nothing funny in it. Not the best way to write comedy.

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.

I was trying to figure out when to do this post, and then I realized, based on an Ancestry.com search, that Harry Lucey died in August 1984. I don’t know the exact date (like I said before, there was no obituary), but even though I’ve missed the 25th anniversary of his death, this might be the right time to write a bit about him. The rediscovery of Harry Lucey has been one of the best things to come from the revival of interest in Archie comics in the last few years. I don’t think most people, including me, had any idea who Lucey was until quite recently. He retired before Archie started giving credits, so readers couldn’t see credited stories in the ’80s and use them to identify the earlier work. And he doesn’t really have a clear hook to identify him: Bob Montana created the characters, Dan De Carlo set the new house style in the ’50s, but Lucey was… well, he was a house artist at MLJ who did a lot of fine work on their superhero and adventure titles (including Madam Satan, a character he helped create), proved equally adept at comedy when his company chose to focus mostly on “comical comics.” According to a commonly-told story, his girlfriend’s sister at the time was named “Betty,” which is how the name came about. (The only other stories about him are that he once came into the office to hand in his pages after being hit by a car, and that he used to draw his stories with the girls wearing no clothes on all but the first page.) He was the main artist on the Archie title from the late ’50s through the mid ’70s, applied his skill to everything from regular 6-page farce stories to an issue-length Beverly Hillbillies takeoff where Veronica apparently falls in love with her own cousin and even bringing some decent craftsmanship to that infamous story that was nothing but 12 pages of plugs for Archie merchandise. In 1974 he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and retired.

But now I think that while he’s not precisely a cult figure, he’s better known than he was at any point in his lifetime. He even has some advocates: Jaime Hernandez frequently talks about Lucey as a big influence (along with De Carlo), Kurt Busiek recently cited this Lucey Betty and Veronica cover as his favorite of the series. Dan Nadel wanted to include Lucey in his book “Art Out of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969″, and reluctantly left him out only because he decided the book should be exclusively focused on non-mainstream comics creators. But that’s how interesting Lucey has become to some collectors, artists and historians: he’s an Archie guy who is discussed in the company of the greats.

This thread provides a good selection of Lucey covers and art, including one of the quintessential Lucey stories, “Two Little Words” (which, miracle of miracles, recently turned up in a digest, and Archie wasn’t even re-drawn to remove his bow tie). And I’m going to borrow this comparison idea from the beginning of that thread: There’s a 1973 issue of Life With Archie that had a cover story drawn by Lucey, but the cover itself was drawn by Stan Goldberg (starting in the late ’60s, almost all covers had to be drawn by De Carlo or people who drew in his style, like Goldberg; Lucey and other artists rarely got to do covers from that point on). This is Goldberg’s cover, based on the splash page of the main story.

Now, that’s a good cover. It shows that Goldberg wasn’t always the guy turning out disfigured tinmen. You can see, with Reggie, how the curved mouth-to-jaw line, which has now gotten out of hand, was effectively and tastefully used. It’s the work of a very good artist. But then we turn the page and see Lucey’s splash page from the story proper. It’s not like this page is Lucey’s best work or anything; his way of drawing faces had become so stylized as to be a little freaky at times. But everything is specific instead of generic, even though it’s a generic scene. The girls aren’t just doing standard girlie-art poses, they’re holding themselves at slightly awkward angles, trying to find things to do with their hands. If there were no dialogue balloons, you’d still get a sense of every character’s role in the panel. (Why Jughead replaced by Reggie on the cover, don’t ask me.)

The thing Lucey was really good at was physical acting: making body language convey emotion, making one drawing convey the feeling of something that led up to it, giving the feeling of physical impact to a drawing. When money-sniffing Cricket O’Dell makes her first appearance by literally running over Archie to get a quarter, you sure feel the impact of him getting knocked over. (Though you may also wonder what happened to his head.) Of course he could always handle a “Archie gets thrown out of Mr. Lodge’s house” splash page, conveying every bit of pain inflicted on Archie but playing it for comedy.

And Lucey’s body-language skills made him especially good at handling those Frank Doyle scripts where it’s almost nothing but the characters talking for six pages; those scripts are great, but they can’t work without an artist who always keeps the characters moving and active and never makes the story seem static.

The other thing that I think makes people value Lucey so much is that he really made Archie into a more endearing, funny, everyman kind of character than anybody else. It’s easy to make Archie a bland, personality-free loser who undeservedly has two sexy girls fighting over him. Lucey always seems to play up the more specific and interesting aspects of his character: his clumsiness, his tendency to get really emotional and demonstrative, his over-reaction to any situation. Lucey’s Archie is always getting really angry or really scared, crying, screaming, waving his hands in the air and railing against fate; when he’s happy, he’s unbelievably happy, and when he sees a hot girl his eyes look like they’re this close to doing a Tex Avery pop-out. Lucey’s Archie is also the most destructive (he always wrecks everything in Mr. Lodge’s house). All the characters benefit from Lucey’s theatrical, broad gestures, the flailing arms, the angular poses (he could rarely bring himself to let characters walk or stand completely straight), because it’s funnier that way. But Archie himself benefits most of all, because by giving him a broader emotional range than any other character, Lucey sort of gives him the right to be the star of the comic.

Other characters Lucey was really good at: his Veronica was probably the only version who could actually make you understand why Archie found her hotter than Betty, despite their identical faces and figures. De Carlo was an undisputed Betty and Veronica king, but he drew them more or less as the same wholesomely sexy type; Lucey usually made Betty a little more wholesome in her body language — and very needy and clingy when Archie was around — while Lucey’s Veronica is very sultry and self-possessed. His version of the Mr. Lodge/Smithers comedy duo was also a highlight; I almost wish they had given him some kind of Lodge family spinoff.

If IDW makes good on its promise to publish best-of collections for the great Archie artists, I’m hoping there will be a Lucey collection in there somewhere; if not, the best way to get your Lucey fix is to pick up some cheap copies of Archie from before 1974. Especially the late ’50s/early ’60s because that’s when the whole company’s output was at its strongest. But even with the coming of new fads, strange story ideas, Saturday morning tie-ins and some inkers of dubious quality, the basic Lucey virtue — strong, emotion-specific poses and staging that sells the jokes — is usually there. Even when he’s asked to turn “Archies” producer Don Kirschner into a comic book character.

Finally, probably the quintessential Lucey story is still “Actions Speak Louder Than Words” from Pep 140. It’s a story that makes good on its title: No dialogue, and there doesn’t need to be because Lucey’s drawings tell you everything you need to know about what the characters think and want.

Despite my recent preoccupation with the company’s past, I have to admit I don’t follow current Archie comics much, and when I do, I conclude that it’s not just nostalgia talking: they really aren’t funny enough now. All the emphasis on soapy plot twists and gimmicks is not a good sign for a franchise whose titles were mostly popular with kids as the comedy alternative to superhero comics, and which seems at some point to have drained the comedy potential out of most of its regular characters. But I will admit that this, from a list of upcoming comics for November, looks more interesting to me than Archie marrying Veronica, Betty, Midge, Ophelia, Cricket O’Dell, Miss Betty Lou Clutchgrapple, or whoever:

ARCHIE & FRIENDS #137

PART ONE OF A TWO-PART STORY THAT REINTRODUCES SOME OF THE MOST MEMORABLE CHARACTERS ARCHIE EVER PUBLISHED!

“Cosmic Cosmosis Part One”: Working at the Pep Comics shop to get a discount on comics and a place to store his collection, Chuck is visited by his friends as he bags and boards. Suddenly, glowing meteors from the MLJ Nebula rain down in Riverdale, including one that crashes into the shop and morphs into a door to other dimensions! This cosmic portal leads to a world that Chuck, Archie and his friends have only ever seen in comics… a world of talking ducks and bears, super-powered heroes and oddball beings from other planets. It doesn’t take them long to realize they are in the presence of a veritable “who’s who” of some of the greatest comic book characters ever published by Archie and its earlier incarnation, MLJ Comics: Captain Sprocket, Cosmo the Merry Martian, Squoimy the Woim, Gloomy Gus, Judge Owl, Ginger, Suzie and more! The trouble is, now that the “fantasy world” has invaded the “real world,” the “fictional” characters seek as much a taste of reality as possible: Wilbur and Seymour want to meet “real” girls to date, Pat the Brat realizes there’s a whole new potential audience to pull pranks on, Cubby the Bear wants to see how earth bears live, and more. On top of it all, Super Duck and Reggie get into a no-holds-barred shouting match!

Okay, so I know and you know that this is probably mostly a way for a company to get all their defunct characters back into print for a moment, on the off chance that they might want to do something with them (or license them out like their superhero characters). But this still sounds like a perfectly respectable idea in a one-off, “remember that guy?” kind of way.

Most of these characters failed because they weren’t any good, and ruined many a child’s digest-reading experience — do you know what it’s like to be in the middle of a digest and then find Super Duck, who is not super in any way, screaming at some salesman and getting electrocuted or something? — but as Justice League Unlimited proved, it can be enjoyable to see characters who weren’t very good, as long as they aren’t the star of the story.

The only remaining question, though, is which of these characters was most horrible to encounter in a digest. There were a couple whose comics were actually good, like Cosmo the Merry Martian, and a few others who were inoffensive, like Wilbur (he’s like Archie, except he’s conventionally handsome, and nobody wants handsome heroes, so get out of here, blond boy). The real boredom came from:

- Funny-animal characters intruding on the wacky human-kid adventures I paid to read;

- Anything that appeared in various Mad ripoffs from “Archie’s Mad House” to “Tales Calculated to Drive You Bats!”

But ultimately, nothing compared to Super Duck for the sheer power to make six pages of digest space feel like a soul-destroying void. Not just for all the reasons described by Mr. Kitty at “Stupid Comics” — the Donald Duck ripoffs without any of Donald’s basic charm, the inappropriate duck sexuality — but because every story was irredeemably depressing. It was like watching a bad Chip and Dale cartoon — an asshole gets his life destroyed by other assholes — except with worse drawing and more comprehensible dialogue. “Super Duck” is like Curb Your Enthusiasm if Larry ended every episode bankrupt, abusing his family and trying to murder people with axes.

And yet, for historical/geeky purposes, I’d even be OK with seeing that guy again. Once. With a written and signed guarantee that he will never get his own comic book again.

I except Katy Keene from this list of digest-ruiners because while she did ruin many a digest for me as a boy, I admit that I probably just didn’t get her because I was a boy. If I hadn’t insensitive clod, I would have known why it was important to care what she would wear to her double date with Randy and K.O. Kelly.

No Who’s Who this week, as momentous events necessitate a pause: namely, the publication of Archie #600, the now-notorious “Archie proposes to Veronica in an imaginary story” issue.

Now, back when the issue was first announced, I took the opportunity to make fun of Betty being insane, and that took on a life of its own to be sure. But I genuinely like Archie comics; at their best they’re clever comedy set pieces, intelligent absurdity told in five pages. Full-length issue stories tend to be… not so good, really. The world of Riverdale works best in small doses. But nonetheless, I was interested to see what Archie Comics did with it…

…until I saw Stan Goldberg’s name on the solicit.

Now, Goldberg is a veteran Archie artist, there’s no question about that. He’s done a lot of good work over the years – maybe not on the level of the true greats like Dan DeCarlo (who is owed a huge artistic debt by Goldberg, I believe), or Harry Lucey and Samm Schwartz (I prefer Lucey to Schwartz, although I know many disagree with me on that score), or Bob Bolling, but he definitely did a lot of work over the years that was greatly worthy of applause; I also think more than any artist he’s really responsible for the development of the Archie house style, taking the visuals Bob Montana created and DeCarlo refined and more or less creating the points for future artists to imitate. By no means is Goldberg anything other than a respected elder of the comics industry. Come on, the guy did Archie vs. The Punisher! You have to respect that.

But the problem is that “a lot of good work over the years” only works if by “the years” you mean “prior to, oh, 2000 or so.” Goldberg’s art – which was never brilliantly inspired but at least was solid draftsmanship – has gone downhill terribly. And by terribly, I mean – oh, just look.

Look at Archie’s Mom there. What the hell is with her face?

Now, understand that many Archie artists have used the trick of running lines along the side of the face to connect jawline to cheekbone. DeCarlo did it all the time. Heck, Goldberg’s use of it back in his prime was excellent. It’s a perfectly valid stylistic choice.

But compare DeCarlo and Goldberg’s work above with some of Goldberg’s work in Archie #600. Seriously: look at this shit.

The net result is the idea that everybody in Riverdale has massive, massive jowls. Alternately, everybody in Riverdale is descended from the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. I can’t be the only one who thinks this looks ridiculous. Some of those jowl-lines are so pronounced that they’re practically spikes. Still, if this was the only problem with Goldberg’s work nowadays, I expect there wouldn’t be any issue. Much like how John Byrne has two faces he uses over and over again (one male, one female), it could be written off as artistic quirk rather than gratuitous error.

But.

Midge – pointy jowls. Moose – jowls, and also he looks really fat when he doesn’t look that way in any other panel. Archie, meanwhile, appears to be preparing for a guest appearance on The Sopranos – Riverdale.

Betty was so distraught by the news of Archie and Veronica’s nuptials that her foot fell off!

I note that apparently now Miss Grundy wears makeup all the time. Lipstick? Really? On Grundy? That is freaking me out.

What is with Archie’s foot there? Is Rob Liefeld ghosting for Goldberg now? (No, no: if Liefeld were ghosting for somebody, everything would look suspiciously like an old Dan DeCarlo comic, badly traced.)

There is so much wrong with Cheering Black Girl’s face I’m not sure where to begin, but I just keep looking at it and thinking that her head looks like a potato.

(Also, Goldberg has helpfully given Chuck a baseball cap with his name on it, so we do not mistake Chuck for the plethora of other young black male characters in Archie comics.)

AGH KILL IT WITH FIRE

What the HELL? Look at Veronica’s face. It is deformed. It looks like she is so happy to be with Hinge-Jaw Archie there that her skull has started expanding. Oh well, maybe when we switch to the closeup -

…no, apparently in closeup Veronica not only has a radically deformed skull but also her entire face is off-center to the left. (Understand that this is one of the big romantic beats of the comic, too; Goldberg’s art is actively working against the story at this point by being so odd.)

I could go on at length – there is plenty of bad art in Archie #600. But that’s not surprising because Goldberg hasn’t been up to his previously established level of quality for years now; it’s so bad that it genuinely looks like a different artist. Look at this panel from a 1979 Laugh:

Naturalistic but vibrant: even an Archie stuck in a mound of trash conveys the just-previous motion of Betty and Veronica throwing shit at him and knocking him over, and Betty and Veronica’s stride looks realistic – the abstract nature of the cartooning conveys their movement skillfully. Now look at this:

See what I mean?

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Hi, I’m Jaime Weinman, of Something Old, Nothing New and TV Guidance; thanks to MGK for inviting me into his domain.

Now, I love snarky comments about Betty Cooper’s insanity, or Archie comics panels and the improvement thereof. But I’m also interested in trying to learn more about the non-official history of Archie as a company and a force in comics, something that can drive a person almost as crazy as Betty Cooper. Trying to do research on Archie comics is frustrating for two reasons. One is that the company’s great artists and writers — and they really did have some of the best in the ’50s and ’60s — mostly died without being interviewed by anybody. Harry Lucey’s mastery of body language and comedy has been rediscovered in the last few years, but he died in a town in Arizona without so much as an obitiuary or a press release from the company. Samm Schwartz (Jughead) was one of the funniest cartoonists in comics history, but there was only one short article on him in his lifetime, and at least one book mentions him mainly as a guy who didn’t like Steve Ditko’s artwork when he was an editor at Tower Comics. (Interesting, but not really the most important aspect of his career.)

The other problem is that the company itself has always treated artists as interchangeable cogs, even more so than most comics companies, and even now they have little interest in promoting the reputations of particular artists and writers. This is, after all, a company that made up the story that John Goldwater “created” Archie once Bob Montana was no longer alive to point out otherwise.

A happy exception is Bob Bolling, creator of Little Archie. Bolling is the exception to a lot of rules. The Archie company allowed him to sign his work at a time when almost nobody else got that privilege; they let him cultivate an extraordinarily personal, quirky style of writing and drawing in their pages, and they’ve even given him some promotion, as you can see in the image above (from his second issue of Little Archie). The happiest part is that he’s still alive and working, and therefore has been able to give interviews and get some acclaim for being one of the greatest and most distinctive talents in comics.

Jaime Weinman: “The thing that struck me most is that Mr. Weatherbee just seems to accept that once Betty has got a victim in her little school-approved torture chamber, it’s “too late” to stop her. Unless he’s just assuming that Veronica has already been suffocated to death and that Betty is trying to force the poison into her lifeless mouth. That’s just one of the things he has to put up with at his school.”

Via Jaime, proof of both Betty’s delusional character and the fact that Jughead is aware of how deadly she is:

That would be Betty, imagining Jughead to be Archie, and trying to fuck-strangle him to death.

(previously: one, two)

Top comment: At first, they asked Jughead why he didn’t join the search party. He just stared at them, turned, and finished the second bottle, before driving to the Cooper place, crossing himself, and popping open the trunk full of gas cans, a crossbow and a taser. – Chris Lowrance

In relation to Betty Cooper’s obvious insanity, I give you this, brought to my attention by Jaime Weinman:

This would be Betty, trying to murder Archie, because Archie had the temerity to blow off a date with her.

What’s worse is that Archie clearly has no idea about how crazy Betty is, and Jughead clearly sees it. Poor Jughead must spend half his time trying to warn Archie and the other half worried for his life. He sips his malteds down at the Chok’Lit Shoppe, eyes darting about, staying alert for the crazy blonde bitch who’s determined to fuck and ritually slaughter his buddy (and possibly not in that order). Does she know he knows? Is she, even now, planning his death? ¹

Imagine the conversations we never see.

ARCHIE: So that Mr. Weatherbee, huh? What a crazy old guy.
JUGHEAD: Yeah, Archie, that’s great. Say, how about Betty?
ARCHIE: Right! I totally asked her out Friday night like you said I should.
JUGHEAD: I said you should go talk to the police about Betty. How did you get from that to “ask her out?”
ARCHIE: Man. I don’t know. Why should I talk to the police about ol’ Betty?
(JUGHEAD rubs his face exhaustedly.)
JUGHEAD: She painted a mural of you, naked, on the side of the school, with the words “Worship Him” underneath.
ARCHIE: Now come on, Jug ol’ pal. There was that fig leaf.
JUGHEAD: Arch, you’re not getting it. Betty is -
(Enter BETTY.)
JUGHEAD: – here! Betty! Hello! How ya doin’?
BETTY: (ignoring him) Archie, I just wanted you to know that Friday night, I’m going to do something very special for you.
ARCHIE: That’s great, Betts! Your cookies are always fantastic! But be sure to bring enough for everybody?
BETTY: …for everybody?
ARCHIE: Yeah, for the beach party? The one we’re going to? Ronnie and Moose and Reggie and everybody will be there.
BETTY: Ronnie will be there.
ARCHIE: Yeah, Jug and I were talking and -
JUGHEAD: And Archie, Archie all by himself, thought maybe the whole gang should meet up Friday. And then he went out and invited everybody without even consulting with me! Or I would have said, “Arch, maybe you should just take Betty.”
(BETTY stares at JUGHEAD, long and emotionlessly.)
BETTY: I see.
JUGHEAD: Good. That’s good.
BETTY: Well, I’ll be sure to bring plenty of… cookies Friday night. Hey, do you know what Ronnie will be wearing?
ARCHIE: She said something about a skimpy bikini.
BETTY: I bet she did.
JUGHEAD: Whoa, look at the time! We’ll be late for class!
BETTY: We can’t let that happen, can we? Bye, guys!
(BETTY exits.)
ARCHIE: Man, I can’t wait! Seeing my two best girls in skimpy bikinis!
JUGHEAD: Christ, you’re an idiot.

Top comment: You are all fooled. Archie isn’t an idiot. He knows exactly what’s going on. He’s playing the entire town because that’s how he get’s his kicks.

Whatever that may be. – Zenrage

1. The pins on Jughead’s hat have their tips dipped in various antidotes. Jughead knows that Betty has studied extensively on rare and exotic poisons. Should one of his burgers come with a “special surprise,” he’ll be ready to jab himself and live. [↩]

Recently, the news that Archie will propose to Veronica has been sweeping the nation. Much like how Captain America died or Batman died. Now it is Archie Comics’ turn to temporarily revive the fortunes of a flagging intellectual property through a shamless stunt.

Of course, this particular move, like so many others, has been met with criticism. Mostly because Archie is marrying Veronica. Most comics fans don’t like Veronica, believing her to be a stuck-up mean bitch. And this is true. Veronica is a stuck-up mean bitch. But here are some truths about Veronica most people don’t want to realize:

1.) She is rich. This counts for a lot.
2.) She is unpredictable and fun.
3.) She doesn’t care much what other people think of her.
4.) She is rich, yo.
5.) Most importantly, she is not Betty Cooper.

Some people do not realize that this last is a major plus. Betty, after all, is the “nice” one. She makes Archie cookies and helps him with his homework and does charity-type things and doesn’t gripe about being kind of poor. Plus, let’s face it: she’s smoking hot. Why wouldn’t Archie want to marry Betty?

The answer is simple.

Betty Cooper is motherfucking psycho bugfuck crazy.

Look at this shit. Understand that Archie is a popular kid, sure, but he is not exactly the star of his school. (That’s Reggie. Just because Reggie is an asshole doesn’t mean he’s not super-popular at Riverdale.) Archie is the decent guy everybody likes, who gets okay-to-good grades, plays on a couple of sports teams in a non-star fashion, and dogs lots of chicks. He is pretty fucking unremarkable as teenagers go, and were it not for his line of comics he would be the most boring human on the planet.

Betty Cooper is psycho for Archie Andrews, who tops out at “the most averagest person around.” She has giant blow-up pictures of him. That you know she took herself, with her stalker camera. Look at some of those photos, how awkwardly cropped they are. That’s because they are photos of Archie not knowing he is being photographed.

You know goddamn well the only reason she has pictures of Archie in the shower is jilling-off fodder. That’s not sexy. That’s fucking disturbing. Porn is great. Porn you make yourself – not in the “videotaping yourself doin it” sense but the “take time to produce life-size beat-off photos” sense – is creepy.

She kept an audiotape of him speaking! What. The. Fuck.

You just know that she looped it and edited it so she could have imaginary conversations with Archie. “Archie, do you think I am the prettiest girl at school?” “Heck… yes… Betty. I would… LIKETO… take… YOU… out for… a soda?” In Bettyworld, she is the rich one, and Archie is secretly a prince from the kingdom of Mevonia, come to take her away on his unicorn steed to a idyllic life of sybaritic pleasure.

She is so crazy that when she thinks Archie is near, her sleeves disappear as her psionic powers spontaneously manifest themselves! (Okay, that’s a bit of a dig on the art, but come on, Dan DeCarlo made so few mistakes that when you find a biggie like this one you have to comment. Archie artists today couldn’t hold DeCarlo’s jock if they had a crane.)

Note also how her father holds her back. It is much akin to how one holds a Rottweiler back before you let it rush into a dogfighting ring. “Savage him, Betty! Savage him and leave him bleeding and praying for death!” He knows what happens if you let Betty loose without tranquilizing her first. There was that time in Ohio. That’s why he’s Mr. Cooper now, instead of Mr. Lifschitz, and why Betty is no longer Brenda.

“Imagine if she told him he loved her.” If he did, that would be when she would go get her rifle, climb the clocktower, and start shooting at Lodge Mansion’s windows. “HE LOVES ME!” *BLAM* “HE LOVES ME!” *BLAM* “TAKE THAT, SMITHERS! I CAN KILL BECAUSE ARCHIE LOVES ME AND ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE UNIVERSE!” *BLAM* “ARCHIE WANTS YOU TO BLEED, MR. LODGE!” *BLAM* “ARCHIE’S LOVE MAKES ME IMMORTAL! I AM A GODDESS OF EVERLASTING PEACE AND LOVE!” *BLAM*

Top comments:

Are you guys seriously anylizing a COMIC BOOK? I mean, maybe a book i could see, if it was a realllly old classic, but Archie books? – Tigerthecat

Tigerthecat: Hi. You must be new here. – Lister Sage