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.