The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 766: Archie's Girls Betty and Veronica #319, August 1982

We'll get back to Alpha Flight tomorrow. Busy day today, so a quick little Archie title will get us through. The stories within the comic are pretty standard Archie fare, but it's the cover that caught my attention when I was poking about in the dollar bin today. Rich, white, privileged Veronica is shouting about all the problems she's aware of in her bid for Class President - Betty, only slightly-less privileged, is asking if she knows the solutions. It put me so very much in mind of the recent U.S. election that I had to buy it. And then, later in the day, I was chatting with a friend about how so much writing from back in the late 70s and early 80s seems to be eerily prescient about the Orange Man's rise to power and the problems that accompany it. Even here in Archie comics.

That aside, there's not a lot to distinguish this comic from many of the other AGBnV comics I've read. Betty and Veronica clash over Archie, over school, and over clothes.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 556: Archie Giant Series Magazine #482, June 1979

The covers I post of a lot of comics are not indicative of the actual comics I'm reading. I think I mentioned about a Black Lightning comic last year that the copy I have is worn and discoloured from years of reading. My copy of this particular Archie Giant Series is much the same. It's beat up and creased, and I was pretty sure it was missing some middle pages, though according to the GCD entry, all the stories are there. I'll reiterate what I said about the Black Lightning comic - there's something wonderful about the idea that so many different hands have touched this comic, have read the stories, that the comic has sat on a bedroom floor gathering dust, or under a bed, or has been relegated to a cottage somewhere to read, year after year, as the people who visit it get older. Archie, Betty, Veronica, they all stay the same age.

That said, it's gotta be time to move on from the Archie comics. I'm getting cranky with them. Why, can anyone tell me, in the girls versus boys game that's going on on that cover, are the girls wearing bathing caps and the boys wearing helmets?

The stories in this issue are a very strange mixed bag. The first is a science fiction story in which Betty takes control of a spaceship and proceeds to mercilessly kill an entire fleet of invading aliens. It's a bit on the violent side, even for one of these genre-fiction inspired Archie stories. I can't imagine any version of Betty being quite so bloodthirsty (though Afterlife with Archie is likely to prove me wrong!). "The Manhunters," an oddly-titled tale, is pretty typical Archie fare, though the last couple of panels give us a rare glimpse at some bonding between Veronica and Jughead, and a punchline to the story that returns us to the first joke in the piece in a nice, circular fashion. And "The New Image" offers us a Veronica Lodge with permed hair. Her effort to change her look ends with her face-down in a fountain, perhaps a pointed commentary on what would happen to the comics if things changed too much. There's something to that, but my brain's in a very tired place today.

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 555: Archie Giant Series Magazine #164, September 1969

An actual giant-size collection of nutty stories, basically revolving around Betty and Veronica trying to look as good as they possibly can in bikinis, and Archie drooling over every woman that walks by. And, honestly, that cover up there is totally indicative of the creepiness of Archie in this issue. He stumbles lasciviously through this issue with everything except a raging erection.

The comic does raise an interesting few questions, though. There is one story in which Betty, Archie, and Veronica go fishing, and Betty is really good at it. We get to see Archie appreciating a woman for something other than their well-rendered figures, and are thus given an inkling that he might see women as more than simply objects. But for the most part, the comic hinges on Betty and Veronica using their looks to turn his head. Archie comics have always been relatively good at reflecting the culture within which they're created, though erring more on the conservative side, and this comic, coming from a time of turbulent social change, at least offers tiny glimpses of moving into a space of equity and representation. In more recent years, Archie Comics have unabashedly embraced diversity and representation - we see the tiny seeds here from which the current crop of titles grew.

I find, as I'm reading more and more Archie comics, that I'm getting better at distinguishing the various artists from one another. It used to be that I thought there was a pretty standard Archie "house style," but I see now it's a very sophisticated blend of individual styles and standard character designs. There's a bunch of Al Hartley stories in this issue, and I keep expecting them to end with a paean to stories from the Bible. Dan DeCarlo is like the George Perez of bikini clad girls in beach scenes. How he manages to put so many characters in one panel and have it not look cluttered is beyond me.

A couple more days, and they we'll leave the Archie gang alone for a while. I've got a week's worth of Westerns that have been waiting a long while for their turn in the project. Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 553: Archie Giant Series Magazine #234, June 1975

It's amusing, occasionally, to see the remnants of previous owners that inevitably show up in Archie comics. Today's comic, for example, was quite obviously owned at one point by a pubescent young man who, strangely, seemed to be obsessed with periods, if the sketched in tampons falling from between Betty and Veronica's legs are anything to go by. And I make the assumption of it having been a male as I cannot imagine any young woman thinking that such a thing was even remotely funny.

So there's that.

I'll do a few more Giant Series issues over the next couple of days, until I hit an even 2 weeks, and then we'll move on. There's a really excellent story in this issue in which Veronica proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that, in a superhero universe, she'd be a villain. The tale hinges on the difference between power and justice, with Veronica lauding her power over Betty, and Jughead maintaining, and eventually championing, the triumph of the just over the powerful. I may scan it and post it on the blog one of these days. There's some really sophisticated ideas being bandied around, and it's always cool to see such discussions happening in a context one would not expect.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 125: Betty and Veronica v.2 #262, December 2012

I remember buying this issue at a local Chapters store because of the cover. I'm a fan of pop culture homages, and when you mix Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vampirella, and the Riverdale gang, how can you lose?

I probably shouldn't ask questions like that.

The story doesn't quite go full tilt and cast the heroines in the roles they propose to on the cover. The Vampironica of the cover is actually a "vampire clone" of Veronica, and Betty only becomes a slayer accidentally, preferring the garlic the vampires in the tale rather than stake them. That's what I get for judging (comic) books by their covers, I guess.

What's nice, though, is getting a taste of Riverdale in the 21st century. Much of my Archie Comics intake has, of late, been fifties through seventies stuff, and my early exposure was almost exclusively digests from the eighties. I did read the wedding issues in the main series a few years back, but aside from that have had little to no exposure to the newer mainstream Archie. (I say mainstream because I'm voraciously devouring Afterlife with Archie and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina at the moment.) While it does maintain the distinctive art style and general set-up of tales (though this one is more along the lines of the older Life with Archie), there's something missing that I can't quite put my finger on. Though the older stories were very much set in a nostalgic, pre-racial American middletown, there was always a subversive streak to them, one thumbing the nose to that nostalgia even as it celebrated it. I think the more recent stuff has let go of that subversion. Conversely, I've thought for a while now that Archie Comics as a publisher has been pretty forward-thinking in its practices, but I'm not sure that the writers they've hired are always thinking forward in the same way. I guess once Mark Waid and Fiona Staples take over the main series, we'll see what happens.

That's all for now. See you tomorrow.