Of all the Archie comics I have in my collection, I think I enjoy the Giant Series Magazine the most. It offers a nice variety of all of the good things that Archie comics do well, feeds my predilection for Christmas-themed comics, and has one of the most confusing numbering orders I've seen in a comic. The GCD tells us that "[i]ssue numbers are 1-35, 136-251, and 452-632," and that "[t]he missing numbers do not exist." I'm not entirely certain why, though I have come across issues of other Archie Comics series that have that "Archie Giant Series" box on the side, but are actually a part of the regular series, albeit a larger comic.I wonder if, internally, those giant issues of other series fill in the gaps of this particular series.
Anyway, I'm going to read a bunch of them over the next week or two, and we're starting with a jokes issue. These, I'll admit, are not my favourite format for Archie stories. They're most often a page or half a page, and the jokes are fairly generic. By this, I mean that it doesn't have to be the Archie characters in these short strips - it could be anyone. In a lot of ways, it simply feels like trading on the popularity of the characters to tell second-rate jokes. I much prefer the longer stories that turn on quirks of personality in the characters. But we have to start somewhere, right? Not a bad comic, but certainly not the greatest.
More Archie tomorrow. Onward!
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