Rhyming Titles from Jughead and Archie Jumbo Comics #10
Snow Show
Smart Art
Flip Quip
Dollar Scholar
Work Quirk
Dine by Design
Read Creed

Rhyming Titles from Betty & Veronica Comics Double Digest #231
Great Fate
Same Game
Peek Tweak
Dream Theme
This digest (the current issue) also has the sweet symmetry of a Veronica story titled “No Problem” running right next to a Betty story titled “The Problem.”

According to this fashion page from Laugh Vol. 2 #14 (June 1989), Big Moose is a U2 fan. Must be because he beats up so many of Midge’s suitors “in the name of love.”

Of the 23 stories collected in the culinary-themed Archie Comics Spectacular edition Food Fight!, only five feature Riverdale High School cafeteria chef Miss Beazly. That’s a very low percentage. Just as remarkably, none of those five stories paints Miss Beazly as a hopeless bad cook. In fact, in “Dishing It Out,” she wins a Food Preparation contest at a Cafeteria Managers Workshop, and in another her lack of popularity among the student body is blamed not on any lack of skill but on “bad menu choices” such as Catfish Pizza, Mystery Loaf and Liver Burger.
The most common foods in Food Fight! are cookies and cakes—baked to perfection by Betty and Ethel, ruined by Veronica.

A fashion page reprinted in the just-released Archie’s Funhouse Comics Double Digest #12. There have been an Archie punk fashion page and an Archie grunge fashion page, so a Heavy Metal one is not so bizarre. But what made them reduce “The Archies” to a male trio? Afraid that Betty & Veronica would look too much like Tawny Kitaen or Lita Ford? There are limits, apparently.

Rhyming Gag Titles in Archie’s Funhouse Comics Double Digest #12
Sad Lad
Theme Scheme
Heap Cheap
Work Turk
Library Lunacy
Sum Fun
Sock Yock, or “I Made a Big Hit Tonight”

I find the idea of titling these gags amusing enough already—the title takes up a panel, and the gag itself only lasts two to four panels—but it’s even funnier when the title has a lengthy subtitle. It’s a throwback to the overly words comic strips of the turn of the 20th century, which were so festooned with titles and captions and descriptives as to make the drawings superfluous. But even that style of overexplanatory panels was passé by the time Archie was created in the early 1940s.

Subscribers like me don’t get to choose which alternate covers they’re going to get, and I’m largely held off from buying multiple copies of the same comics just to get the cooler covers. But a bunch of very nice alternates are on sale right now at the Archie website for 99 cents each, so I snapped up a groovy Josie and the Pussycats cover drawn by Chrissie Zullo for Life With Archie magazine #33. Many of those variant covers, like this one, have nothing to do with the contents of the issue—Josie, Valerie and Melody do not in fact show up at Veronica’s corruption trial, nor at Jughead’s Choklit Shoppe. Such randomness can be annoying for lay-readers, but at least the Archie company is a lesser offender than DC, which does things like put Harley Quinn on the covers of dozens of books in which she does not appear.
Still, the question remains: if Josie & the Pussycats are popular enough to drive at least three variant Archie covers (this Zullo one and two by Fiona Staples), and Valerie’s affair with Archie has fueled a multi-issue continuity collected in two separate graphic novels, why haven’t the Pussycats characters been granted their own comic again?

Super Graphic—A Visual guide to the Comic Book Universe is a collection of ingenious charts and graphs by Tim Leong which lay out facts about various graphic-adventure worlds in a way

I’m curious about where Leong got his data for some of these charts, but am more curious about why Archie Comics is so underrepresented. True, Archie characters have always stood out for their aberrant normalcy and nonsuperheroic powers. But there is over 70 years of history there that can organized in numerous fascinating ways. Leong devotes only chart exclusively to Archie interests, and chooses a dubious theme: “Archie’s Ample, Awesome, and Awful Alliteration.” The concept, apparently, is that a statistically significant number of characters in Riverdale have alliterative names: Archie Andrews, Jughead Jones, Dilton Doiley, Waldo Weatherbee, Moose Mason… Yet as the chart shows, many other Archie characters, major and minor, do not suffer from the same alliterative affliction: Reggie Mantle, Veronica Lodge, Midge Klump…
When I start to think of other comic companies, Archie seems positively diverse, namewise. In Metropolis alone, there’s Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, Kitty Kowalski. Lucy Lane, Lori Lemaris, Mister Majestic, Mr. Mxyzptlk and Streaky the Supercat.

More Archie Anagrams
(devised by me, Mabel and Sally)

Here, boy!
Overweight
Thoughtful
Dreamy
Outdoorsy
Good friend

Moose’s
Intriguing
Diminutive
Girlfriend
Except she likes Reggie too.

Mean
Overprotective
Ox-like
Sporty
Envious Boy

Dictionary-reading
Inventive
Lab-coated
Trustworthy
Overeducated
Nerd

Things Hiram Lodge Collects
Pep candy dispensers
Beany Brainys beanbag dolls (including Mentor Mouse, Fly IQ, Whiz-Kid-the-Goat and Einstein Owl)
Priceless vases
Antique automobiles
Stamps
Coins
Fine art
His daughter’s attempts at art
Money