Archie Andrews’ matrimonial adventure, a patently obvious
publicity stunt from the get-go, has developed some much less obvious aspects
than the initial blasts of publicity had us expecting. Archie proposes to
Veronica in Archie No. 600 and
marries her in No. 601, and the series has four more issues to run. What’s
next? Plenty, as it turns out. Bigamy. Yup: next, Archie will marry
girl-next-door Betty, who, until now, we’d thought had lost out to that
sloe-eyed vixen, Veronica. To see how this is all possible, you’ll have to buy
all the issues in the 6-issue series. Or you can consult the Usual Place, Opus 249.
The
storytelling in this Archie series, except for the visual staging by Stan Goldberg, is vacuous enough, but
writer Michael Uslan’s plot is
commendably ingenious. Two issues of jejune comedy careening headlong, page
after unrelenting page, was more than I can usually stomach, but Uslan managed
a couple of turns that kept me from throwing up. No. 601, for instance, opens
on the wedding day with Archie, Jug, Reggie, Moose and the rest of the groom’s
gang donning tuxedos, and when Archie complains about his collar being too
stiff, Reggie blurts out what seems a lame joke but is the issue’s best albeit
entirely subversive gag: “From now on, we’re gonna call you ‘Starchie,’” he
says, invoking the name of Mad’s Archie
parody and, thereby, alluding to the infamous humorlessness of Archie Comics,
which eventually succeeded in enjoining Harvey
Kurtzman and Will Elder from
ever again publishing the most exasperating of their Archie spoofs, the Goodman
Beaver story that was actually ribbing Hugh
Hefner and Playboy, not Archie.
In it, the “Archie” character was an unalloyed pill-popping dope-smoking
hedonist — a circumstance casting so many aspersions on the Archie iconography
that John Goldwater, the company’s last patriarch, couldn’t take it and resorted
to the courts to stifle such malfeasance in all our futures forevermore. I’m
surprised Uslan managed to sneak that joke through so straitlaced and rigid an
editorial review, but he did, and I was delighted to encounter it. (The Comics Journal, daringly enough,
reprinted the verboten story in No. 262.)
For my
exploration of how Uslan manages to get Archie married to two women without
divorcing either, beam up to Opus 249 of the online magazine, Rants &
Raves, where, until December 9, we have proclaimed “Open Sesame”: whenever you
run into a Subscriber/Member wall, behave as if you are a member, then use
Jingle as your ID, and Jangle as your Password. That will give you access to
current and archived Rants & Raves, plus all of Harv’s Hindsights, the history
and biography department.
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