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?