The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 2099: Jughead #169, June 1969

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The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 689: Jughead #208, September 1972

Almost forgot!

Will blog tomorrow. I have thoughts on Samm Schwartz!

I am torn. For a while there, once I'd been introduced to their styles, I kind of thought that I was a Harry Lucey fan, as far as old-school Archie art goes. My favourite story, in which a strange alien flower drifts to Earth and becomes Archie's boutonniere, is illustrated by Lucey. A lot of the Giant Series comics I have (which, I have recently decided, I am going to try to collect a full run on) feature Lucey's art, either in reprint or something new. But now and again I'll pick up a Jughead comic from this era, and Samm Schwartz's take on the Riverdale Gang blows me away. Lucey has a real knack for the physical side of Archie's shenanigans, verging on the slapstick. The amount of character in Archie's forelocks under Lucey's direction is amazing. But Schwartz captures something entirely different in his depictions of physicality. His Jughead almost floats through life, making subtle gestures that speak volumes. This is not to say that his more action-packed panels aren't amusing and wonderful, but it's the small gestures of a character, the slight shrug of Jug's shoulders, a downward glance from a foreground girl on the beach, that is his real magic. May have to track a bit more of his stuff down!

Onward!

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 552: Archie Giant Series Magazine #602, October 1989

It's appropriate in a comic dealing with time travel that we see a hint on temporal continuity in the Archie universe. A year after his previous adventure with January McAndrews, Jughead is still dreaming of her, even though his memory of their adventures together were erased from his mind. And, strangely, Jan is having the exact same dream.

Once again, Jug is approached by the time agent, and she explicitly states that it has been a year since their last encounter. Much like the Christmas "Jingles" adventures, there is a specific period of time that has passed between issues. This is fundamentally antithetical to the premise of the Archie universe. No one ever ages or changes - or graduates or progresses, really.

This issue marks Jan's second appearance, and is pretty obviously a lead-in issue to the Jughead's Time Police series that debuted the following year. Jughead comes into possession of a mysterious beanie with very advanced time travel technology attached, and, at the issue's end, January deputizes him and then dashes off into time to see if she can solve the mystery of where the tech came from. One assumes it's addressed in the 6 issues of Time Police.

Which, *sigh*, I'm going to have to find.

Is it meaningful somehow that one of the few people we've seen Jughead actually develop romantic feelings for is a descendant of his best friend, and pretty much a female version of Archie? I know recent comics have identified Jughead as asexual, but there's this odd moment in the late 80s and early 90s where they try to make him a romantic lead. Thank goodness it was short-lived.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 550: Archie Giant Series Magazine #590, October 1988

In tomorrow's comic, I think briefly about the tradition of adventure stories in Archie comics. I'm writing this piece after having written tomorrow's piece and yesterday's piece (catching up from a busy weekend, dontcha know?), which is remarkably appropriate given that this comic is a time travel adventure. And, somewhat surprisingly, it's a really clever one.

The brief synopsis is that Jughead is targeted by criminals from the future because of his fundamental role in creating a peaceful utopian culture. You just knew it had to be Jughead, of all the Archie characters, who would achieve world peace, right? But as Jug is bouncing around through time with a distant relative of Archie's (January McAndrews), some really clever moment happen. Jug and Jan get the idea to escape at one point by transporting themselves back in time one minute and "borrowing" a car because they see themselves do it. This is what's called an ontological paradox in time travel, the seeming spontaneous creation of information. Jughead points this out, and rather than getting the typical "try not to think about it" answer, Jan says this: "We'll always come out and watch ourselves drive away...We'll always go back in  time, borrow this car, and drive away with us looking on, giving me the idea to go back in time and take this care...Over and over again, for all time to come! It's a closed loop paradox! Don't try to figure it out!" Okay, so she does say don't try to figure it out, but she also offers a really interesting reading of the nature of time as a set series of events that play out infinitely across a four-dimensional continuum. The whole story hinges on this, as the event that starts Jughead on his path to world saviour is facilitated by his chance return to the right time and place from the very utopian future he creates.

There's a couple of other nice touches in this issue - January tells Jughead that historians finally figure out what the "S" on Jughead's shirt stands for, to which he replies "They...they know what it means? Everyone knows? B-but that's my biggest secret!" Later, when Jughead asks who Archie eventually marries, January's answer is "He was about to wed one girl...when he changed his mind! And suddenly married the other! Our scholars are still baffled! The girl he married was..." and of course she's cut off mid sentence by an explosion. But these are great moments of playing with the time travel story, and the knowledge that such stories can reveal, within a non-progressing, non-continuity heavy continuum such as the Archie universe.

I think January McAndrews and the time police return in their own series eventually, and since this issue was so clever, I may have to track some of them down. Of all the Archie comics I've read in the last few days, this one is the best.

Onward.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 545: Archie Giant Series Magazine #553, September 1985

Well, it's a world full of food, obviously.

Jughead attempts the noirish detective in the first story, hot on the trail of a saboteur at a candy factory. He's assisted by Hot Dog, whose asides are not as funny as they're probably supposed to be. I think I prefer Hot Dog when he's more dog, and less hairy Jughead. Though, having read Afterlife with Archie, this first story involving the pair was slightly bittersweet. Borges wrote a wonderful piece on Kafka that's in Labyrinths, in which he discusses the way that Kafka's work resonates backward through literary time in some ways, so that we can discuss a piece of writing as "Kafkaesque" even though it might have been written long before Kafka. Certain other works have this kind of recursive quality, and Afterlife is certainly one. Having read it, can we ever read any other Archie comics in the same way?

There's an excellent, partially-silent Jughead adventure, reminiscent in some ways of the "Dipsy Doodles" that peppered his titles through the 70s, and a single page that's definitely a Samm Schwartz page, the artist who defined the character in a lot of ways in the middle of the 20th century.

I begin to feel, however, that this series might actually be a clearing house title for stories that just weren't deemed good enough for the characters' regular titles. They've been mediocre so far. One expects, in a comic with 3 or 4 stories, some mediocrity, but also some moments that transcend mediocrity. So far, transcendence has been elusive. But I live in hope.

Onward.

An interesting discovery...

I was going through some old Archie comics today, when I came across this curious panel:

Now, first, Jughead and his writers need a to be educated in the proper language to use when discussing Native Canadian status, but second, what this panel also asserts is that the amazing Jughead Jones has a Native Canadian ancestry.

So the questions arise: is this something that has a history? This is from Archie Giant Series Magazine #529, August 1983, which gives Jug's ancestry a scant 33 years. Is it something taken up later on, or in the Jughead reboot from this year?

If you're paying attention, you know that the abuses of Native Canadian and American peoples, and of Indigenous peoples more broadly, has been, and continues to be, one of the most egregious abuses of human rights ever. Positive portrayals of Native peoples in popular culture, though only a small contributor to what needs to be fixed, are vital. Jughead made some waves earlier this year with the acknowledgment of his Asexual status in a recent comic. I wonder if this aspect of the character is something the current writers might take up?

Now, for the sake of context, the story ("A Word to the Wise") continues with Jug joking about this ancestor being "the only cop north of Nome...'Ol' Bluenose Jones' they called him!" prompting from Veronica a command to "Cut the jokes!" They move on, and it's never mentioned again. The prompt for Jug's declaration is his knowledge, during a game of Scrabble, of the word "umiak" - "a large open skin boat once widely used throughout the Arctic for whale hunting, or moving materials and groups of people."

I'll admit, there's an ambiguity to the sequence, but that ambiguity opens us to a very cool reading - Jug's deploying knowledge learned from his great, great Grandfather for a wonderful purpose: to frustrate Veronica Lodge. And really, in Archie comics, what greater purpose is there?

So I'm curious. Anyone out there ever see anything like this in Archie comics, or was this a one-off?