The Art of Casper Jim
Archie Andrews generally lives in a Mad Magazine-like mirror world of parody. The same celebrities and institutions exist in Riverdale that you can find in the world at large. They just have funnier names.
In the story “The Swing of Things,” Archie’s dad, Fred, listens to “Benny Badman” rather than Benny Goodman records , which Archie thinks are better than the “awfully repetitious” videos on “NTV.”
In “The Champ of Camp,” Mr. Lodge collects pop art masterpieces by “Sandy Airhole” and “Casper Jim.”
In “The Hot ‘70s,” Jughead learns to dance like “John Revolta.”
Yet decades before those other stories, in the 1945 “Junk for a Junket,” Archie gives a one cent tip on a $15 restaurant bill, and the waiter responds “Thanks, Meestaire Benny”—a real world, non soundalike reference to noted radio cheapskate Jack Benny.

One of the enduring mysteries of The Archies, at least in their comic book incarnation (distinct from their recordings and TV manifestations) is whether this is a successful band or not. In some stories, they are a humble, struggling garage band hoping to land a gig, any gig. In other stories, they’re touring the world, playing arenas alongside Josie & the Pussycats and The Madhouse Glads.
‘Twas ever thus. In the early ’70s story “I’ll Bite!,” which has just been reprinted in Betty & Veronica Comics Double Digest #229, The Archies are playing their biggest hit song in the living room of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, who brags too her aunt “Isn’t that a great song, Aunt Hilda? They received a gold record for’Sugar Sugar.'”
“Bah!,” Aunt Hilda responds. “Ever since I heard the Archies music is on the air, I’m tempted to stop breathing it.”
In the world of Archie, rock & roll largely exists as a reason to be tossed out the front door by a disapproving authority figure. It is as great a signifier of the generation gap as clothing or slang. A guitar might as well be a target, or a toreador’s red flag. It doesn’t matter that The Archies have sold a million records, or are showing responsibility and good business sense (not to mention creativity and musical ability) by managing such a project while still in their teens. It ultimately doesn’t make a difference, in Archie world, if they’ve sold a million records or zero. They’ll never win over their parents with that blasted noise.

Archie #663, arriving just months before the title’s big makeover, deals with some key elements of the character’s legacy. Just one story in the issue, with multiple subplots, trendily titled “Sons of Anarchie.” In the first few pages, Archie’s old Mustang-like automobile falls apart (and into a lake) so he goes to his grandfather (who looks alarmingly like his grandson, even though neither of Archie’s parents resemble him in the least) to see if his previous vehicle, that red Model T jalopy of yore, can be revived in time for that night’s big opera concert, a mandatory event for those who want to pass Prof. Flutesnoot’s music class. Grandpa offers Archie an old motor scooter instead, which turns out to be a hip and influential choice. Veronica, meanwhile, also becomes carless, and rides a house too School. Hilarity ensues.
There are obvious problems with this story. Like, when did Prof. Flutesnoot stop teaching chemistry and switch to music?; did Archie blow up the chem lab one too many times? But in most respects, the tale (written by Chuck Dixon, not an established Archie scribe) follows the comfortable and familiar model of clumsy, penniless Archie getting in scrapes while trying to survive high school and please his girlfriend. If the impending “new Archie” changes too many of these essential characteristics, well at least the old title is going out in classic style.

Best Archie Digital Only Graphic Novels

Archie at the Chocklit Shoppe. Site of many an ensemble story that can’t be set at a school or party.

Archie’s Jalopy. The original jalopy was of Model T vintage so it could seem ancient in the 1940s when Archie started driving it. The car was retired in the 1970s when it was old enough to be a priceless collectors item (and in fact there were numerous stories based on that concept). It was replaced by a newer really old car, seemingly some kind of Mustang.

She’s Josie. The pre-Pussycats Josie, delineated by Dan DeCarlo who named the heroine after his wife). Her distinction was not ghost-chasing or magical friends or ears for hats. It was simply that she was a female equivalent of Archie.

Archie 1. Archie and the gang’s primitive ancestors discover basic tools of civilization, from arrows to kissing to fire to School. The stories are vaguely creationist, since humans are coexisting with dinosaurs. But the best ones are hysterically funny, true social satire.

Archie’s Campaign Trail. So many school elections! So much corruption! So many bad reasons for running!

Archie—Tennis Racket. There are several sports-based “digital exclusives.” This is the least violent one, even though characters invariably end up with broken  tennis rackets dangling from their necks like collars.

Archie Presents: Tales Calculated to Drive You BATS! What panic was to Mad, bats was to madhouse; a comics company”s own knockoff of its popular humor title. Compared to satirical humor mags like Mad, Cracked and Sick, Bats was big nosed and cuddly.

Archie & Friends—Movie Magic. Film parodies and celebrity encounters.

Archie’s Fall Fun! It’s easy to forget how many Archie stories involve the taking of leaves.

Archie & Friends—Father Figures. Archie’s dad Fred Andrews practically ran away with the Archie radio series in the 1940s, and insinuated himself into many a comic story too. Stereotypical harried-Dad stuff: overworked, misunderstood, short-tempered, vain, etc. There’s a digital exclusive devoted to Archie’s mom too, and it’s of a rather different temperament.

Betty & Veronica #269 is a classic modern Archie story. The issue- length adventure takes place in a single  day, from dawn to late night. Each page is divided into three panels–one following Betty, another Veronica and another Archie. They all end up in the same places with different perspectives. Not exactly Rashomon, but a well constructed, creatively told typical day in Riverdale. Just reread it on the Archie digital service, and marveled at its efficiency.

One thing I love about Archie is the sales on their website. Scarcely a week goes by without a new 25% or 30% discount deal. This is a genuine incentive when one is debating getting one’s umpteenth Jughead-themed T-shirt.

Not only that, when the Kevin Keller comic and the Life With Archie magazine both got cancelled, I got notices in the mail saying that not only would my subscriptions to those titles be applied to other Archie comics, but that I could have further discounts on Archie website stuff.

Discounts are cool, but so is the Archie merchandise. I subscribe to all the regular Archie periodicals plus the online Archie Digital Comics service, but when it’s still hard to keep up with all the collections and repackagings and coffee table books, I head to archiecomics.com. Plus, archiecomics.com realizes that at least a small part of its fanbase is not 12 years old, and maintains an “Archie’s Vault” page of older items still kicking around from other eras. I am now the proud owner of a set of colorful little metal tins emblazoned with images from Sabrina the Teenage Witch: The Animated Series, circa 2002.

My daughters and I have been floating candidates for Most Changed Supporting Character in Archie —characters that are so seldom used or so poorly defined that the writers and artists either forget what they ever looked like (or that they previously existed), or feel obliged to reinvent the character. I thought that Hermione Lodge, Veronica’s mother, is the most shifting character. (It amuses me that the current Afterlife With Archie storyline brands Hiram Lodge—Veronica’s dad and Hermione’s hubby—as a serial adulterer. They might as well have made him a man who marries a bunch of different-looking women named Hermione.) The girls proposed Nancy, Archie Comics’ first regular female African-American, who first appeared in 1976 (seven years after Valerie, the first female African-American in the Archie universe, joined The Pussycats). Nancy was the de facto girlfriend of Chuck Clayton, son of the Assistant sports coach at Riverdale High. Nancy’s look, tastes and style continue to change. She’s sporty. She’s studious. She’s hip. She’s nerdy. She rarely carries a story by herself. Still, Nancy’s in a slightly better position that Hermione Lodge, who sometimes drops off the face of the earth, with stories that have you believing Veronica Lodge is a motherless child.

“Do you know, Archie, I think I’ll invite you to my Christmas party. And you couldn’t refuse after knocking a girl down, could you?”

“But Archie, I found your Christmas list!”

“I can chop down any tree Archie can… and more!”

“Archie! Please! Don’t say no to me! You mustn’t! Please!”

“Arch, it’s Christmas! At this time of year all such pettiness is put aside!”

“Ol’ Arch got too involved in his gift wrapping, Ronnie! He won’t be able to help you today!”

“Come on, Archie! Join us! We’ve got extra songbooks with us!”

A few Christmas story titles found in recent Archie digests:

The Secret Santa Secret Swap

Treed

Branch Line

Santa Saga

The Shoppers

The Dirty Dozen (About Christmas sales techniques)

Not That Gifted

Buffet Ballyhoo

Mr. Lodge’s Christmas Adventure (parts one and two)

Christmas Chaos

Bright Sight

Tact Act

… and, as compiled in Archie’s Favorite Christmas Comics:

Archie Andrews’ Christmas Story (the first Archie Christmas story, from 1942)

She Needs a Little Christmas

The Case of the Missing Mistletoe

Christmas Cheers (“Tsk tsk, the modern generation”)

Generous to a Fault

Seasonal Smooch

A Christmas Tale

Extreme Decorating

Price Clubber

Snow Flakes

Holiday Rush

Gift Exchange

Christmas Misgivings

Give and Take

Stamp of Approval

Fit to Be Yuletide

The Gift Horse Laughs

Snuggle Up

Snow Mobile Snuggle

Wanted: Santa Claus

Santa Claws

The Naughty Clause

Santa’s Little Helper

Santa Shortage

Playing Santa

Surprise Presents

Pizza and Good Cheer

A Job for Jingles

Return of Jingles

Jingles All the Way

Season of Magic

Treed

Jingle Rocks

Some Things Never Change

Visions of a Sugar Plum

’Tis the Season to Be Jolly

She’s So Gifted

The Gifted

Holiday Watch

A Children’s Story

Let It Snow

Hanging Hang-Up

Foto Fun

Ski-Cart Catastrophe

Slay Ride

Frosty Fairy Tales

Party Time

Party Dogs

The Party

You’re Cooked

A Couple of Fruitcakes

Here We Come a-Caroling

Archie’s Holiday Fun Scrapbook

 

Big Archie Comics announcement last week: The company’s flagship comic, Archie, will be relaunched, and its issue numbering reset from #666 (or thereabouts) to #1. The impetus is the participation of two major comics talents, writer Mark Waid and artist Fiona Staples.

The recent history of Archie is of attention-getting stunts that assure big sales of the first few issues but which have debatable longterm impact. The more realistically drawn “New Look” phase lasted a couple of years and was confined to the digest and trade reprint formats, not imposing on the major Archie titles. The various grown-up Archie series—“Archie Marries Betty, Archie Marries Veronica, Archie Marries Valerie, the Life With Archie magazine, et al.—ended a few months ago with the Death of Archie finale. The zombie comic Afterlife with Archie is currently still hot, on its seventh issue and boasting a new spin-off, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. The author of those comics, playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, was recently given the title of Archie Comics’ Chief Creative Officer.

So, this could just play out as another easy-hype quick-fix.

But it should be said also that rebuilding Archie’s flagship title right now is not such a bad idea.

This is far from the first time that Archie has been reinvented. The original 1940s stories drawn by Bob Montana seem harsh and grotesque compared with the willfully softened renderings of Riverdale by Joe Edwards and others starting in the 1950. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Archie employed two superlative comic artists, Harry Lucey and Dan DeCarlo. DeCarlo’s influence was particularly widespread, and many later Archie artists willfully aped his style. The other supreme Archie artist was Stan Goldberg, a giant in the teen-comic genre who did Archie knock-offs for both DC (Binky & His Buddies) and Marvel (Millie the Model) in the 1960s before spending 40 years doing the real thing. The main Archie comic belonged to DeCarlo and Goldberg for most of the last 40 years. They are the titans.

But DeCarlo, godlike as he was, died in 2001, not long after a tragic falling-out with his longtime employers over rights to the Josie & the Pussycats characters. Goldberg, who was Archie’s ace delineator for the last decade, trusted with major projects like “Marries…,” passed away at the end of August. Some DeCarlo and Goldberg disciples still exist in the Archie stable, but only Jeff Schulz comes close to nailing that style which has defined the Archie characters since the early ‘60s.

There have been some inroads made in finding a new Archie art style. I’m partial to the work of the artist known as Gisele, who drew the instant-classic “Reversedale” tale in which Archie and the gang switched genders.

Fiona Staples, who’s been entrusted with Archie’s latest new look, may be able to make hers stick. She did an awesome Josie & the Pussycats poster—it hangs in our home—and did some excellent alternate covers, ones so good I bought the same issue twice. She draws teens as rough-and-tumble rock-and-rollers. There’s an energy to her work that rumples up the old clean-cut Archie to good effect. As for Mark Waid, he has a loyal following for his Marvel Comics work, and did a bang-up job reinventing The Fox for the revival of Archie Comic’s old Red Circle imprint.

It seems, unfortunately that the Archie makeover team is only contracted for a few issues. Hard to know if this will really get the ball rolling. The Life With Archie magazine, which came hot on the heels of Michael Uslan’s ingenious Archie Marries… saga, foundered quickly due to convoluted plots and lack of direction. Hopefully there’s a long game plan for the new Archie. The Archie #1 announcement suggested that whatever transpires will be lasting, that the renewed Archie comic will differ from the classic Archie that will persist in the digests and reprint books.

Changing times, bold measures. Archie used to exist in order to explain what a teenager was. Now teens rule the planet. A new Archie is indeed in order. The thesis here is sound. But can they deliver?

…and, if you don’t mind me asking, wherefore Jughead? His eponymous comic was put on hiatus ages ago due to its own rumored makeover. Hate to be greedy, but…