The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2418: Archie Giant Series Magazine #175, September 1970

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I'm in a minority, I think, when I profess my love for the Archie Giant Series Magazine series. Granted, it stopped being quite so giant by the end of its run, and common understanding is that it was a bit of a dumping ground for stories not deemed quite good enough for the main titles.

But it also gives, at least in this early anthology iteration of the title, a nice, median-range overview of what Archie, as a company and as a character, was attempting during a time of pretty intense civil unrest. This era of Archie tends to skirt the really troubling issues, but every now and again we'll get a glimpse of one of the writers or artists offering a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) critique of current events. If I'm to be honest, it's very often a critique with a bit of a sneer, but, as with Marvel in the 60s, you've got a bunch of guys who are rapidly approaching middle age trying to write as if they're the heppest, coolest cats on the block, Daddio. As someone well past that approach, I recognize that I do not, and cannot, speak like the young people of today. And this is a good thing 😏

What we can never fault any Archie comic for is the quality of its art, however. Archie Comics are the creme de la creme when it comes to cultivating a house style. That's not to say that there aren't differences between the various extremely-talented artists who've graced Archie's pages, but when you're establishing a brand with a highly visual component, visual recognition is key. You need to be able to identify Archie Andrews in any media, by any artist, and immediately associate him with the brand.

That's given me an idea for a rare non-40 Years post. I'll try not to forget.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1863: Archie's Love Scene, 1988

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I'm not sure why I decided to read another of these comics today. I am fascinated by Christian comics. They're basically telling all the same stories as the superhero comics I love, but the addition of the palpable need for the reader to join and believe all the stories, or the complete lack of allowing the reader to figure out the metaphors themselves is super irksome.

There was one story in here that I actually took quite a lot away from. It used the metaphor of thermostats and thermometers to talk about how we react to things. When a thermometer gets hot, the mercury rises and when cold, it drops. This is a person who allows external events to dictate their responses/behaviours. In contrast, a thermostat controls the reaction, and thereby is more able to handle difficult situations. I'm definitely a thermometer these days. But I'm trying to be a thermostat. That said, I do not need the help of an all-knowing God to help me with this.

I've got Superman.

More to follow.

Related Posts and Further Reading

I quite like Archie Comics, and have written a fair bit about them over the years.

And for a really (really) long read on my thoughts on Superman as contemporary religious icon, feel free to dive into my Master's thesis. 

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1862: Archie's Parables, 1986

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The way I have my comics stored, I've got a bunch of short boxes on shelves, and I keep the box tops underneath them - this way I can access the collection much more easily than having to pull the box off and open it up. It's not a lot of time, but it also looks pretty nice. (I'll have to post some pics of my comic book kingdom one of these days.) Since the lids are on the bottom, I'm able to display a single comic by sliding into the lid. My plan this week was to read all of the comics that I've selected as the display comics right now. They change every couple of month, and I always try to put interesting or novel things on display.

Archie's Parables was displayed on the box containing my Spire Publishing/Barbour Publishing Christian Archie comics, so I thought I'd give it a try. I remember talking to Mike at Purple Gorilla Comics here in Calgary about these comics, and how one very rarely finds them in good shape. His theory was that kids got tricked by them (I know I did), thinking they were Archie comics, and then getting to the end of literally every story and the punchline, so to speak, was God. And re-reading this comic today, I don't think I'd realized just how Evangelistic they are. However, I think it's best to let Al Hartley's classic art, and, really, horrendously Christian writing, to speak for itself:

  

As a friend of mine noted upon seeing this sequence, it really does look like Archie has some salacious ideas about those filthy books.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that these comics are ridiculously Creationist. *sigh*

More to follow.

Related Posts and Further Reading

I had a bit more to say about Hartley's art and his adaptation of Corrie Ten-Boom's The Hiding Place.

And if you're interested, here's some other things I've written about Christian comics.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 143: The Hiding Place, 1973 (Two Weeks From The Dollar Bin - Day 7)

I have a strange little soft spot for the comics that come out of Spire. Al Hartley's Archie comics from this line are some of the earliest I ever read, and I was always totally put off by the evangelistic tone that inevitably happened near the end of each story. I was too young at the time to notice that they were published by someone other than Archie Comics, so I just assumed that this was something that that publisher did.

But Spire also published straight ahead Christian proselytizing comics, and this adaptation of Corrie Ten Boom's The Hiding Place is a perfect example. (Though, it being a dollar bin buy, it's missing the middle pages, but the plot is such that it's not that hard to figure out what happened in the missing sequences.) I'm interested to know if the explicit and constant references to God and Jesus are quite as rampant in the original book as they are here, and what has been cut out to adapt this story to the Christian childrens' market. A large portion of the narrative deals with the protagonist being interred in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, so I'm thinking that there's some really awful things deleted from the comic adaptation. In such a case, I wonder if the adaptation is doing even remotely any justice to the original narrative, and further if such stories ought to be adapted to an ostensible children's medium solely to spread the word of Christianity. Isn't it somehow disrespectful of ten Boom's experience to tidy it up in order to preach to children?

Though there's a "personal message" from ten Boom at the end of the comic claiming that Jesus has been with the reader all through the comic, so perhaps she didn't mind at all.

I'll hit up a few of the Spire Archies in the next little while, and will occasionally be reviewing some of their other works, either ones similar to The Hiding Place or others that are aimed at audiences even younger than the Archie audience. What I'll grant Spire's line is that the artwork is pretty great, though seeing characters in a prisoner of war camp with the same kind of rocket-boobs that Betty and Veronica sport in 60s Archie comics was a little off-putting. Perhaps, though, that helps to bring the story's horrors more into focus. Hartley's art, even out of the context of Archie, is very Archie-esque, and so a well-read reader is faced with something that both reminds one of the adolescent hijinks of Archie and the gang within the milieu of a concentration camp.

The preachy God stuff at the end still bugs me, though. See you tomorrow.