Read this today. Will blog tomorrow.
Tomorrow:
I was quite inebriated when I posted that last night. I picked up the comic at a thrift shop yesterday with some Bionicles, and I read it in the car waiting for Tara at the Bulk Barn. A typical summer Archie special, replete with pin-ups of Betty and Veronica in summer wear, and lots of bathing suits. One of these days I'll do a count of the number of Archie comics covers that feature Archie staring wide-eyed at scantily clad beauties on the beach. I get the feeling that numbers don't go that high yet.
The stories are pretty typical, though "A Word to the Wise," about a Scrabble game between Archie, Jughead, and Veronica is really pretty atypical. There's the same slapstick, but it's an iteration of the Archie story formulas that I've not seen before. Last year, when I was indexing Bart Beaty's The Twelve-Cent Archie, he pointed to a few of the formula stories that happen over the course of the decade he was reading. The stories in Archie comics that really stand out are the ones that don't follow these formulas, I find, but then they're also the ones that feel the least like an Archie story. My favourite all-time Archie story is from an issue of Pep (that I'll get around to blogging one day) where a weird plant falls to Earth one night, and Archie wears it on his shirt for a day and experience some very strange behaviours. It's almost like an old EC science fiction story, though with less blood and mayhem.
Anyway, a little beach comic goodness is a nice thing at this point in the year, especially in Calgary. Maybe I'll have to make summer-y comics a regular thing while Winter's holding sway over Western Canada.
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