Confession of a Childhood Archie Reader

Lest anyone think that there's no place for white men in the majestic progressive future, have no fear. Life with Archie tells us that there is--sacrificing our lives to prevent the deaths of gun-controlling homosexuals.

I won't go into a discussion about it because it's already been beaten to death and it's last week's news. I'll just mention that Life with Archie isn't exactly "canon" Archie. It's an ostensibly adult-oriented comic set in Archie's future and has been pathetically SJW-pandering from its inception.

Besides, I can't do any better than Kathy Shaidle at Taki's. This, however, caught my eye:

There are three things that I do not understand: the success of Al Jolson, the popularity of Milton Berle, and the appeal of Archie Comics.

I can't offer much about the first two but maybe I can shed a little light on the last one.

As one can imagine from the content on this blog, I've long been an enthusiast for a million things and a devotee of very few. Archie comics were grist for the mill in my effort to consume everything that looked the tiniest bit interesting.

For me, and the ubiquity of them suggests others, the appeal was in their digests. These were books, slightly bigger than a quarter of a magazine page, that were available at every supermarket's check-out lane. They were cheap and stuck right in kids' faces just as they were the most bored. Formulaic and inoffensive, they are remembered as nostalgically as Ring Pops.

They were stuffed full of stories from Archie's vaults. Stories from the fifties were alongside stories only a year old. Obscure characters from the past appeared frequently, most often Katy Keen, a model whose comical stories were at odds with an art style more consistent with dramas.

Reading old comedy has an unexpected benefit:  it gives us a snapshot of the culture that we can't get otherwise. In seventy-five years, will a Monica Lewinsky joke land like it did in 1999? The Kardashians, for example, will probably not be recorded in the annals of history but an episode of "The Soup" preserves the public attitude toward them.

Here's an article describing Archie-as-snapshot from the AV Club.

Since the first story about Archie Andrews and his Riverdale High chums appeared in 1941, the series has stealthily ripped everything rank and transitory about youth culture and passing fads, from the jitterbug to slam-dancing. As a result, anyone itching to do a cultural history of the United States might as well start with the seven volumes of the Archie Americana Series, which cover the '40s through the '80s.

Did anyone ever laugh at an Archie gag? I doubt it. It's appeal was the same as those execrable sitcoms on Nickelodeon and Disney--a bunny slope for the next generation of  pop culture consumers. The only difference is that Archie's products offered us a picture of how our media developed.