Lil Jinx: Women, Amiright?

Lil Jinx is one of those side-comics from Archie like Sabrina the Teenage Witch, That Wilkin' Boy or Superduck. It's probably the least interesting of them all, though. It's one of those comics that just exists. It's just there, you read the page, then you move onto something you actually care about. Or you skip the pages altogether.

But sometimes you crash into a Lil Jinx page that just makes you stop and cringe and... I dunno, have a genuine reaction to it. So here, take a look.

Yeah.

--Andrew S.

Jughead and Sexuality: Rhythm & Blues

Last time we took a look at Jughead's sexuality it was with a story called, "Brain Campaign". If you haven't seen that one yet, maybe you need to check it out.

That time we looked at a story that didn't have much subtext, and looked at how it pretty much threw out the possibility of Jughead having any sexuality at all. He just loves food! Well let's look at a story that's the polar opposite of Brain Campaign, one that's laden with subtext. So laden with subtext that it's nearly impossible to tell which of it is intentional and which of it isn't. Ladies and gentlemen I give you Rhythm & Blues. 

This is a story written by the amazing Frank Doyle and drawn by the titanic Samm Schwartz, so you know you're in good hands from the start. (For those not familiar with Frank Doyle or Samm Schwartz, believe me I'll have more to say about these two masters of the comic arts in the future, but for now know that they're among my top three Archie creators, with Dan DeCarlo filling out the rest of the list.)

Archie vs. Transformers: A talk about storytelling.

Man, this is such an unfair fight.
How do you beat Archie?

So I was reading a modern Transformers comic recently and I found myself bored out of my skull. It's weird, because the story wasn't awful or anything, it's just that I couldn't engage with it.

Why not? Well, it was the art. The scenes I was trying to read were talking scenes -- scenes without any main action beyond characters yammering at each other. That's fine -- I love those sorts of comics when done right. Exposition scenes are actually something I really enjoy. The comics medium is able to create really dynamic exposition sequences because it's able to show things in such diverse ways.

But, that's not what we go here at all! All we got was a boring, grey, and very static sequence.

And y'know what? I think I know who could have done it better. Samm Schwartz.

Jughead and Sexuality #2: The Song Writers.

This story was scanned from
IDW's "Best of Samm Schwartz"
hardcover book.

Way back in one of our earliest posts we started to talk about Jughead's sexuality. Back in that post I said that it's impossible to actually judge Archie characters in a general sense. To understand them you have to take it on a case-by-case basis.

I stand by this idea, the Archie characters are players who have general roles, but the specifics change from the story to story. With that in mind, let's take a look at this story and see what it can tell us about Jughead's sexuality. The story is from 1964, written by Frank Doyle and drawn by Sam Schwartz. Doyle is hands down my favourite Archie writer, and Schwartz is my second favourite Archie artist (after Dan DeCarlo), so this is gunna be a treat, believe me!

Archie Metaphors: Sex and Al Hartley.

Steamy as always, Al!

Okay, so it's about time I came back to this subject. You know how in Archie comics kissing basically means the same thing as sex? Of course you do. I already did an article about it! If you haven't read that article go there, then come on back.

So kissing = sex in the universe of Archie comics. But what does that mean for the work of Al Hartley? As we know, Hartley wrote a series of official comics about Archie for Christian publisher Spire Comics... wait, why do we know? Well because I already told you. That's right, here at 80 Page Giant we believe in having continuity between our articles! We are a comics blog, after all.

So you've got those two elements. Wholesome Christian comics and kisses that are basically a metaphor for sex. How do you reconcile the two? Did Al Hartley realise that kissing was the same thing as sex? Maybe, in his ignorance he didn't realise about the metaphor, and there was some hilarious results?

Let's find out!

The Archie Experiment: Spire Christian Comics.

Oooo! Take that,, uhhh... unnamed girl.

So, a few posts back I told you about the late 1980s, early 1990s Archie experiment. It wasn't, however, the first. Not by a long shot. Hell, Archie's been experimenting since the 1940s. But today I want to tell you about something that's from the 1970s (And into the 1980s), Archie's experiment into Christian comics publications.

Yup, that's right, the super-secular comic company, run by a dynasty of Jewish publishers, decided to license their characters for use in Christian comics! How the hell does that happen?

The Archie Experiment: Jughead's Diner.

Dan Parent and Bill Golliher are my heroes!

It's hard to think of Archie comics as being particularly experimental. After all, they're such incredibly formulaic comics. Believe it or not, though, Archie comics do go through some really experimental phases.

The one I'm most familiar with is the late 80s, early 90s Archie experiment. During this period there was an explosion of new, experimental, often insane titles. New aesthetics were experimented with. Character dynamics were experimented with. Some things were successful, some things weren't, but it was an exciting time to be reading Archie comics.

Don't believe me? Don't think they would have been brave enough to mess with the formula for familiar, iconic characters?

Well, my friend, during this time Jughead Jones acquired not one, not two, but three new love interests. (All of them were redheads, and one of them was actually Archie's descendant from the future in the comic Jughead's Time Police. Yeah... that's an entire other post in and of itself.)

One of my all time favourite Archie experiments, though, was Jughead's Diner. Jughead's Diner was a fantasy sci-fi comic set in a surreal 1950s diner setting, starring Jughead as basically the chosen one, meant to save the world. No... seriously.

UK vs. USA #1: Make Sure It's Formatted

This is gunna be a big, long, rambling one folks. I wanna talk to you about the super interesting topic of comic book formats. So brace yourselves! Just a quick note up front that this article will basically be ignoring newspaper comic strips (and their reprints), and internet comics (and their reprints) just for simplicity's sake.

Can you guess which are the UK and which are the US comics?

THE BASICS
So let's talk about the essential difference between American comic books and British comic books. Not the stories or the characters. Not the themes, or style, or tone. Let's talk about the difference in format.

As promised.

Geez Dan Decarlo, you do make it hard to choose!

This one's for Monzo and Walky!

--Andrew S.

He's Magically Vicious

Despite the Kirby-centric paragraph to the left,
the art here is credited to Dick Ayers. Just FYI.

So it's fair to say that I'm a fan of Jack Kirby. However, I don't think I've read as much of his material as I would like - in terms of collections, I believe I only have The Forever People of his Fourth World books, and a couple trade paperbacks of his '70s Captain America and the Falcon run. So when I saw a reprint of the Joe Simon/Jack Kirby run of The Fly for cheap at a local comic show, I made sure to snatch it up.

The Fly is one of the Archie Adventure Series heroes, published by, yes, Archie Comics. The company actually started out publishing superheroes (under the name MLJ Magazines), but America's Favorite Teenager soon eclipsed his super-brethren in popularity and became the publisher's flagship character.

Where does The Fly figure into this? He's not one of the "Golden Age" heroes of MLJ, for one, having been created by Simon and Kirby in the early 1950s. He became part of their core stable in years to come, though - whenever there was an Archie superhero revival, you'd be sure to see him alongside The Shield and the Black Hood (who did start out in the '40s), even if he was sometimes called Fly-Man.

Archie One-Page gags.

Oh Ethel. You're so ugly and repulsive!

So when I'm going through and scanning things from my Archie digests I often end up scanning extra pages, because of course when you lay out a digest on a scanner you end up doing two pages at a time. Sometimes you scan two pages you want, sometimes the second page is something else. Maybe it's ads, or the first page of a story I don't want -- and of course sometimes it's one-page strips that are self-contained jokes.

Rather than just delete these, I've been saving the one pagers. So how about I share a few of them today? Yay!

I'm honestly not positive of the genesis of these one-page gags. Some of them are clearly formatted for the single page -- others are clearly taken from Archie newspaper strips. I'll leave it to you (and to my own comments, let's be honest) to try and decide which is which.

As always there's no credits on these strips, so I can't really help you if you're trying to work out who the artist is on them. I can give you a best guess, but that's about it. So how about we get on with the show?

Archie Metaphors: Kissing = Sex.

Best guess at the artist? Dan DeCarlo

When reading Archie comics it's important to remember that they were written and drawn (for the most part) by a bunch of dirty old men.

They're comics aimed at pre-teens, with stories about teenagers, written by men in their 30s and 40s. As such there tends to be a surprising amount of layers to the stories. They can't, for example, show full-on sexual relationships in these comics. On the other hand, it would be pretty realistic for Archie, Betty, Veronica and the gang to be sexually active, right?

So Archie comics get around this using a really simple metaphoric formula.

KISSING = SEX.

Now as always (and as we discussed when talking about Jughead's sexuality) it's basically impossible to talk in absolutes about Archie comics. The degree to which kissing = sex therefore changes from story to story. In some stories kissing is a straight up substitute for sex. For example in the strip we're sharing today.

This One's For Jameel.

Sometimes you're reading a comic and one or two pages just... stand out for some strange reason.

Merry frickin' Christmas.

Sometimes you can't put your finger on exactly why they stand out... other times, yeah, you totally can.

Jughead and Sexuality: The Brain Campaign.

I hate those damned menaces to romance!

If you've ever watched Chasing Amy -- and if you're a geek you probably have -- then you've seen that scene where a gay guy tries to convince a guy of ambiguous sexuality that Archie comics are gay. He chooses Jughead as the main thrust of his argument -- clearly Jughead is the dom and Archie is his bitch.

Okay, that's utter bull crap, and the movie even admits it's utter bullcrap. Archie is, at its heart, a story about straight sexual relationships. Highly disturbing straight sexual relationships a lot of the time. Except... there's Jughead.

Jughead is a self-avowed "woman-hater". He has no interest in girls whatsoever. So, what is his sexuality then? Is he gay? Is he straight, but he just hasn't discovered women yet? Well, honestly... answering that question fairly is nearly impossible to do with Archie comics. You see, Archie comics aren't really into continuity like super hero comics. Rather, Archie characters are like actors cast in different roles according to the needs of the story.