Twelve-Cent Archie: New edition with full color illustrations

By Bart Beaty

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813594460

Bart Beaty

Bart Beaty is associate professor of communication and culture at the University of Calgary. His work has been published in the Comics Journal, International Journal of Comic Art, Canadian Journal of Communication, Essays in Canadian Writing, and Canadian Review of American Studies.

Book preview

More Praise for Twelve-Cent Archie by Bart Beaty

"Twelve-Cent Archie is engaging and readable, funny and thoughtful, and worthwhile for fan and scholar alike. Beaty successfully demonstrates that there is much worthy of discussion in Archie comics and, perhaps more importantly, much work left to be done. This is not a comprehensive study of Archie, nor does it profess to be. It will leave a curious reader thinking about Archie and his pals in new and useful ways, and will hopefully spur more discussion, engagement, and scholarship. Bart Beaty has, I hope, challenged readers to reject the existing assumptions about popular comics in favour of a more nuanced, and therefore more fruitful, approach."

—Brenna Clarke Gray, The Comics Grid, Journal of Comics Scholarship

"For readers interested in the history and form of comics as art, Beaty offers analyses of visual humour, borderless panels and the central authors and illustrators of this era. Twelve-Cent Archie will satisfy cultural critics, Archie fans and comics fans more broadly . . . This book is as fun and satisfying as reading an Archie digest."

—Alberta Views

"In its analytical vignettes on such a wide variety of topics, Twelve-Cent Archie attempts—and succeeds—not in ending our questions about Archie, but in showing us how many more questions we ought to be asking."

—Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

"Whether you’re interested in the differences between Harry Lucey’s Archie and Bob Montana’s, or simply haunted by the signifying structure that is Betty Cooper’s ponytail, there’s something here for everyone who’s ever read an Archie comic."

—Scott Bukatman, author of The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animated Spirit

"An academic text as unconventional as its subject matter . . . Twelve-Cent Archie proves both fascinating and remarkably easy to read."

—The Mary Sue

"Twelve-Cent Archie is engaging and readable, funny and thoughtful, and worthwhile for fan and scholar alike."

—The Comics Grid

An entertaining, diverse read.

—Comics Worth Reading

"Highly entertaining . . . what makes Twelve-Cent Archie such a congenial read is that Beaty is a free thinker about comic books, going wherever, and with whatever improvised opinion, through his 100 brisk, chatty chapters."

—The Arts Fuse

Beaty has crafted his larger critique into bite-sized, self contained mini-essays that help to keep you glued. Any given essay stands on its own and, honestly, you don’t even really have to read them in the order they appear in the book — just like the best Archie comics, really. And Beaty’s attention to the minutiae of Archie comics is beyond astounding . . . By the time you get through Beaty’s astonishing triumph of scholarship, you will wish that all books about comics could be like this.

—Vermicious

Twelve-Cent Archie

Comics Culture

Edited by Corey K. Creekmur, Craig Fischer, Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Ana Merino

Volumes in the Comics Culture series explore the artistic, historical, social, and cultural significance of newspaper comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels, with individual titles devoted to focused studies of key titles, characters, writers, and artists throughout the history of comics; additional books in the series address major themes or topics in comics studies, including prominent genres, national traditions, and significant historical and theoretical issues. The series recognizes comics of all varieties, from mainstream comic books to graphic non-fiction, produced between the late 19th-century and the present. The books in the series are intended to contribute significantly to the rapidly expanding field of comics studies, but are also designed to appeal to comics fans and casual readers who seek smart critical engagement with the best examples of the form.

Bart Beaty, Twelve-Cent Archie

Noah Berlatsky, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948

Ian Gordon, Superman: The Persistence of an American Icon

Andrew Hoberek, Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics

Paul Young, Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism

Twelve-Cent Archie

Bart Beaty

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beaty, Bart.

Twelve-Cent Archie / Bart Beaty.

pages cm.—(Comics Culture)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8135-9046-2 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-8135-9045-5 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-8135-9446-0 (e-book)

1. Andrews, Archie (Fictitious character) 2. Comic books, strips, etc.—United States.

I. Title.

PN6728.A72B38 2015

741.5’973—dc23

2014017498

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2015 by Bart Beaty

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

This overriding interest in close detail of the human condition is the first pointer to an understanding of working-class art. To begin with, working-class art is essentially a showing (rather than an exploration), a presentation of what is known already. It starts from the assumption that human life is fascinating in itself. It has to deal with recognisable human life, and has to begin with the photographic, however fantastic it may become; it has to be underpinned by a few simple but firm moral rules.

—Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy

Eep! Omigosh!

—Archie

Contents

The Twelve-Cent Archie

How to Write (Archie) Comics

Story Length

The Archie Hierarchy

Archie Andrews

How Well Does Archie Speak French?

Bowling

Harry Lucey’s Rhythm

Veronica Lodge

Riverdale, USA

The Daily Strip

Footnote

Why Is It Always between Archie and Reggie?

Archie’s Jalopy

It’s as Easy as A-B-V

United Girls Against Jughead

Archie Giant Series

Invisible Paint

Archie Comics versus Art

Betty Cooper

Riverdale’s Racial Problem

Fashion

Betty’s Ponytail

Self-Plagiarism

Archie’s Sweater Vest

Jughead Jones

Beatniks, Hippies, and Other Undesirables

Dilton Doily

Moose

Reggie Mantle

Jealousy

Are You Familiar with Shakespeare, My Young Ignoramus?

I Never Squeaked a Pip, Either!

Jughead’s Hat

Fantastic Elements

Archie’s Joke Book

Often Imitated, Never Duplicated

The Historical Archie

Mutually Assured Destruction

Betty = Veronica

Head over Heels

Mr. Weatherbee

Caveman Archie

Life with Archie

What Is the Zip Code for Riverdale?

Cover Art

Fairy Godmothers

Dan DeCarlo’s Foreground Portraits

Archie as an Adventure Comic

Text Pieces

Previously on Archie

Notes for the Norton Anthology

Archie: Arch: Archiekins

Eep! Omigosh! And Other Unusual Contributions to the Language of Comics

Archie’s Black Book

Laugh and Pep: The Residual Titles

Pureheart the Powerful

Errors

Midge

You Can Take the Boy Out of Riverdale . . .

Archie Club News

Veronica’s Mother

Mr. Lodge

Betty’s Parents

Jingles

Li’l Jinx

Archie’s Gender Politics

Should Archie Marry Betty or Veronica?

Big Ethel

The Mayor of Riverdale

Worst. Archie. Story. Ever.

Archie the Klutz

Celebrity Culture

Jughead’s Dipsy Doodles

Imitation Is the Lowest Form of Flattery

Surf and Ski

Samm Schwartz’s Art

Self-Referential Metafictions

Riverdale High

Who Cut Veronica’s Hair?

Little Archie

Credits

Juvenile Delinquency

Teenese

The Archies

Pop Tate’s Choklit Shoppe

Unusual Panels

Smithers

The Archie Archive

Fads and Fashions

Borderless Panels

A Comic About Nothing

Fred (and Mary) Andrews

The Banjo in Archie Comics

Wordless Stories, or Nearly So

Hot Dog

Dan DeCarlo’s Split-Horizon Girl

The (Nearly) Perfect Archie Story

The Myth of Archie

Archie and Me

Index

About the Author

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 individual creators.

It is, of course, one of the tasks of the literary or cultural critic to determine the underlying formulae that undergird an ongoing creative enterprise such as Archie Comics. It is necessary to plot certain vectors—story length, character interaction, the rise and fall of dramatic tension—in order to determine the core elements of the Archie narrative. It is the required labor of the critic to sort and to catalogue, to graph and to chart, and to report on the ideal form of the Archie story.

Or it would be, had Frank Doyle and Harry Lucey not done that work already.

In one of the most atypically typical of Archie stories, How to Write Comics, the lead story in Archie’s Pals ’n Gals 34 (Fall 1965), writer Frank Doyle and artist Harry Lucey present a five-page story with no dialogue. All of the text is contained in the captions at the top of (almost) every panel. These captions demonstrate for the reader the entire operating system of the Archie machine.

Anytime, Doyle tells us in the first panel, you start your story with a combination of action and pretty girl you’re halfway home. Under this caption, Lucey depicts Betty, falling off a skateboard and into the waiting arms of Archie. With this one panel, Doyle and Lucey have encapsulated the vast bulk of the appeal of the comics that they were producing. This combination of sex plus action (kiss kiss bang bang to use the title of Pauline Kael’s collection of criticism) also describes many of the world’s most popular entertainments.

Frank Doyle and Harry Lucey literalize the process of writing an Archie Comics story. From Archie’s Pals ’n Gals 34 (1955).

Halfway through the tale, we are told on the third

Reviews for Twelve-Cent Archie

[mikerhode · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent book, best digested in short doses and by people familiar with Archie comics.

[darthdeverell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In Twelve-Cent Archie, Bart Beaty examines a limited run of the Archie comics from the 1960s in order to counter the trend in comics studies that favors auteurism. Further, rather than order his book into regular chapters, he uses a multitude of short, 1-3 page chapter breaks in order to replicate the story length of the Archie comics. In this way, he challenges notions of what defines a monograph. These sections examine everything from character development, location, continuity (or lack thereof), race, gender, and the medium of comics itself. This level of close analysis offers a great opportunity for limited theoretical examination based on a handful of examples within the limited time frame of the twelve cent run. Though Beaty occasionally references events beyond the comics, either in the industry or other artifacts of popular culture in the 1960s, these are used primarily for context only when necessary. In rejecting auteurism in comics scholarship, Beaty counters the trend both from comics readers and scholars to dismiss Archie as unworthy of analysis or serious consideration. He also acknowledges gaps in the archive, as many of these comics have not been reprinted nor included in public collections and are only available through comics dealers for private purchase. In challenging notions of what deserves study and what comprises an archive, Beaty has advanced the rapidly expanding field of comics scholarship. This edition includes full-color reproductions of many of the panels and pages that Beaty analyzes, which aid his discussion as he need not spend undo time describing what can so easily be shown.