Twelve-Cent Archie

Bart Beaty

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813594460
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For over seventy-five years, Archie and the gang at Riverdale High have been America’s most iconic teenagers, delighting generations of readers with their never-ending exploits. But despite their ubiquity, Archie comics have been relatively ignored by scholars—until now. Twelve-Cent Archie is not only the first scholarly study of the Archie comic, it is an innovative creative work in its own right. Inspired by Archie’s own concise storytelling format, renowned comics scholar Bart Beaty divides the book into a hundred short chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of the Archie comics. Fans of the comics will be thrilled to read in-depth examinations of their favorite characters and motifs, including individual chapters devoted to Jughead’s hat and Archie’s sweater-vest. But the book also has plenty to interest newcomers to Riverdale, as it recounts the behind-the-scenes history of the comics and analyzes how Archie helped shape our images of the American teenager. As he employs a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, Beaty reveals that the Archie comics themselves were far more eclectic, creative, and self-aware than most critics recognize. Equally comfortable considering everything from the representation of racial diversity to the semiotics of Veronica’s haircut, Twelve-Cent Archie gives a fresh appreciation for America’s most endearing group of teenagers.

The Twelve-Cent Archie

What is the value of Archie comics? Economically, very little. Relatively speaking, Archie comics are not particularly sought after or in demand in comparison to other comics from the period in which they were most popular. Culturally, probably less. For people of a certain generation, Archie is like the air—he is everywhere, but he is very little remarked upon. That Archie continues to hold some social relevance is evidenced by the fact that every time Archie Comics makes a major change—introducing a gay character, proposing to have Archie marry Betty or Veronica—it induces headlines around the world but still generates relatively little in the way of sales to the public. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Archie’s circulation is barely existent in comparison to its postwar peak; its cultural cachet is even lower. Despite ongoing attempts to make Archie relevant for new generations of readers, the titles are widely regarded as old-fashioned, outdated, a relic of the way that the American comic-book industry used to work.

Beyond the confines of the comics world, for the gatekeepers of legitimate culture, Archie may as well not exist at all. One of the most lowbrow examples of a particularly lowbrow art form, Archie is virtually untouchable. Take, for example, the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption. When Tim Robbins’s Andy starts his prison library, he risks a spell in “the can” when he plays Mozart’s “Sull’aria,” from The Marriage of Figaro, for the prisoners over the loudspeaker. As he does so, the guard who is supposed to be watching him is shown locked in the bathroom reading a copy of Jughead 9 (December 1951). The contrast between the soaring Mozart duet and the lowly secondhand copy of Jughead (literally, toilet reading) could be neither starker nor more indicative of the low esteem with which Archie comics are held. Nostalgic (Andy received his money for the library, in story terms, only in 1955, so the issue of Jughead was already old), lowbrow, and completely out of fashion, what can there be to say about a topic as self-evident as Archie?

Academics have found extremely little to say on the subject to date. Ron Glasberg, a colleague of mine at the University of Calgary, published a 1991 article in the Journal of Popular Culture, “The Archie Code,” in which he suggested that the Archie-Betty-Veronica love triangle is the central narrative of the comic-book universe and, further, that Betty’s blondness represents “goodness and pure love” and that Veronica “with her dark hair, suggests wealth—with its attendant and potentially corrupting temptations.” Glasberg argues that Archie presents a theme of choosing between material success and interpersonal intimacy and, further, that this theme is “of potentially universal significance” insofar as the good girl / bad girl differentiated by hair color can be located in pairings as diverse as the Munro sisters in James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Ginger and Mary-Ann on Gilligan’s Island. I will dispute this reading later in this book with reference to the presentation of Betty (who, it seems to me, represents neither goodness nor pure love), but at this moment it is sufficient to observe that the broadly thematic analysis offered by Glasberg is remarkable as the only critical cultural analysis of Archie previously published. Alexis Tan and Kermit Joseph Scruggs’s 1980 Journalism Quarterly article “Does Exposure to Comic Book Violence Lead to Aggression in Children?” does not even offer a reading of the comics. Instead, the authors exposed two groups of children to comic books—half read a single issue of Marvel’s Daredevil, while the other half read an issue of Betty and Veronica (selected for its lack of violent depictions)—and they were then asked to take a survey that would measure their proclivity toward resolving fictitious problems through the use of physical violence. The results of this primitive media-effects study are insignificant, other than to note that by 1980 Archie comics were generally synonymous with inoffensive comics.

It is striking that so little scholarly work of any kind has been done on Archie. Having been published uninterrupted now for more than seventy years, the character himself is a household name. Until approximately 1974, his adventures were selling millions of copies per month, and he has been the subject of plays, films, television shows, and, of course, a series of hit pop songs. Archie is as American as apple pie, and the vast quantity of material produced about him might suggest that he would be the subject of endless inquiry. Yet scholarly study of comics, as it has developed in universities over the past quarter century, has tended to focus on those comics that best fit the literary scholarly traditions. Works with a single author, or to which a central authorship might be attributed in the case of collaborative works, have been strongly, indeed overwhelmingly, preferred. It should be no surprise, given the emphasis on literariness as the dominant criterion of value, that autobiographical works have been favored with attention that well exceeds the proportional place that they occupy in the field of production. Scholarly work focusing on the “popular,” on the other hand, has tended to concentrate attention on superhero characters, much of it increasingly driven by the same auteurist interests as exist in the study of so-called alternative comics. Thus, auteurism has been the key to the cultural legitimacy of comic books, and it is no surprise that scholars trained in a literary tradition that is so strongly structured around an auteurist canon would transpose that tradition onto comics. In this way, the field of comics has simply sought to duplicate the canon-erecting tendencies of the literary hierarchy in miniature within the comics field, transplanting everything that is wrong with that structure (its elitism, its narrow-mindedness, its ideological blind spots) onto this new research area. A great deal of comics studies (and I will include my own work in these comments) has been an attempt to demonstrate that the marginalization of the form is misguided. Scholars have focused nearly exclusively on those works that can be most easily reconciled within the traditions of literary greatness (Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel) or those of contemporary cultural politics (studies of Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman). This cultural cherry-picking has left enormous gaps in both the history and cultural analysis of comics.

To my mind, the exclusion of the genuinely popular has obscured the actual history of the field. Arguments about the centrality of Marvel Comics in the 1960s fail to note that in 1967, at the height of the Stan Lee–Jack Kirby collaboration on that title, sales of Fantastic Four were only a fraction of sales of Archie and trailed even Betty and Veronica. Arguments about the “mainstream” of American comic-book publishing are all too often willfully blind, excluding children’s comics and humor comics in order to make an artificial argument about the cultural importance of superheroes and their centrality to the economics of the industry in a post–Comics Code publishing period.

Comics studies has rarely focused attention on the truly popular, opting instead for work that can be presented as groundbreaking—work that is formally innovative and inventive, that explores new expressive ground, and that tackles taboo themes or subjects. I would like to suggest, however, that in its blindness, comics studies has a long history of misunderstanding and misrepresenting the contributions of the past, particularly when those contributions can be found in genres that are out of favor—such as the children’s humor comic. Archie comics in the 1960s were replete with the kinds of self-referential formal play that is celebrated as avant-garde when it was done by Art Spiegelman in the 1970s. Wordless comics, metareferential comics, and avant-garde and abstract visual tendencies can all be found in Archie (and elsewhere) in the muck of the unserious comics industry of the 1960s, and our collective failure to account for these basic facts has been a detriment to scholarship.

In this volume, I have attempted to right some of the scholarly wrongs done to Archie by addressing the works as both typical and exceptional. Rather than trying to deal with more than seventy years of comics publishing, and tens of thousands of comic-book stories, I have deliberately opted to limit my study. As John Goldwater, Archie Comics editor and copublisher, was so instrumental in the implementation of the 1954 Comics Code, I had thought to begin there and to conclude with the creation of ABC’s hit television show Happy Days, which in many ways is a televisualization of the same material and whose debut coincided almost exactly with the collapse of Archie comics’ sales. As I began to research, however, it appeared to me that this selection was too broad. The most interesting period in Archie Comics publishing seemed to me to coincide with the long run of Harry Lucey as the lead artist on Archie, the arrival of Dan DeCarlo at the company and his work on Betty and Veronica, and Samm Schwartz’s art contributions to Jughead. To my mind, the team of Lucey, DeCarlo, and Schwartz was the comic-book equivalent of Tinkers, Evers, and Chance, the renowned double-play team for the Chicago Cubs of the nineteen-teens—they were the best at what they did, and their names are now the stuff of legend. While this trio overlapped for only a short period of time (Schwartz left Archie Comics in 1965 for Tower Comics), that time coincided nicely, but not exactly, with the period when Archie comics cost twelve cents. Archie Comics raised the per-issue price from a dime in the comics cover-dated December 1961 and held it there until raising it to fifteen cents in July 1969. This seven-and-a-half-year period corresponds with the peak years of the comics’ production. While strong work was done both before and after the twelve-cent era, I have focused my attention on these books. This study is a reflection of my reading of every single Archie Comics comic published in those ninety months across all seventeen titles.

Though I have been critical of auteurist tendencies in comics studies as needlessly obscurantist, I will note that in this volume I myself regularly fall into the trap that I have decried. Auteurism is a powerful and persuasive organizing system. As Michel Foucault argued in his 1977 essay “What Is an Author?,” the very creation of the concept of the “author” is the privileged moment in the history of literature, philosophy, and science; it is no less so in comics. In this volume, I have paid particular attention to the work of Harry Lucey, Dan DeCarlo, and Samm Schwartz. My attributions of their work have relied on a combination of factors, since none of their stories were formally credited at the time of publication. IDW has recently released eight volumes of The Best of . . . this trio of artists (four volumes of DeCarlo, two each for Schwartz and Lucey), and the indexes at The Great Comics Database have been helpful, if sadly incomplete. While I have only cited artists and writers in cases where I believe I have a high probability of having correctly identified their work, the likelihood of misattribution still exists, and I have very rarely attempted to identify the role played by inkers and letterers (and never colorists).

Finally, as a glance at the table of contents is sufficient to demonstrate, this is not a typical scholarly monograph, just as Archie Comics was not a typical comics-publishing enterprise. I have authored this book in such a way that I believe a reader could dip into any of its one hundred chapters in any order. Indeed, this volume was not written in the order that the chapters are arranged here. It is my hope that each chapter, like every Archie story, could exist independent of the rest, although the chapters are arranged deliberately, if not exactly chronologically. The most interesting thing about Archie comics, it seems to me, is their lack of continuity, their brevity, and their independent functioning within a larger narrative system. I have sought, in a small way, to take this as a model for my scholarship on the subject, allowing the work itself not only to dictate my readings but to suggest the very form of this book. I approached this volume with no predetermined theoretical or methodological orthodoxies. I had not read Archie comics in more than thirty years when I began this project, and I had little idea what I would find in their pages. At one point, I had hoped that the one hundred chapters of this volume would allow me to approach this corpus from every conceivable angle and using every appropriate model. In the novel Changing Places, David Lodge paints the image of Morris Zapp, a literary scholar who aspires to “a series of commentaries on Jane Austen which would work through the whole canon, one novel at a time, saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said about them. The idea was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle, historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it; so that when each commentary was written there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question.” Like Zapp, I have failed in this goal. The truth is that I discovered in the Archie comics of the 1960s a level of complexity and interest that was entirely unexpected. With their complexities and contradictions, these comics may well be inexhaustible—like all the best works of culture. Ultimately, I have relied on a combination of close readings contained within short, loosely connected chapters. My more modest goal has been to offer a scholarly version of the Archie textual digest, in which I hope to demonstrate the efficacy and cogency of the interrelated short-story comics form as a significant alternative to graphic novels self-consciously modeled on literary parameters.

How to Write (Archie) Comics

There can be absolutely no question that the Archie comics published in the twelve-cent era were the product of a semi-industrialized system. Having, at the time, twenty years of previous publishing history to rely on for the development of characters and settings, and having a strict level of editorial oversight, Archie Comics was a well-established entity. The comic books were highly conventionalized in terms of look, layout, and design. While individual artists occasionally stretched the limits of what was permissible and treated material with their own distinctive rendering styles, the goal of Archie Comics was not to produce a widely disparate set of stories but to provide readers with essentially the same material month after month, with only as much variation as would be required to keep them coming back for more. While it might be possible to imagine a somewhat distant future when Archie would graduate from Riverdale High, go to college, begin a career, marry Veronica (much to Betty’s consternation), live a full and meaningful life, even die, these were only imaginings. They were not plots to be developed (although some of them were by later generations of Archie Comics artists in the first decade of the twenty-first century). Constancy was the key, and constancy required repetition, which required formulae. Moreover, formulae necessitated a system of production that endures beyond the terms of indi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• The Twelve-Cent Archie
• Index
• About the Author