Despite the feelings my brother and I have and often express about the crumminess of many comics,1 I gotta admit that I love Archie.
But let me be clear: Archie is not a good comic. It's lame. It often relies on puns—bad, reused puns. It reinforces gender stereotypes. It reinforces all sorts of other stereotypes. But here's the deal: Betty and Veronica are total babes. Archie is idiotic. Jughead is almost serenely idiotic. I can't really explain it beyond that; I just start reading one of those double digests and I can't stop. And today I discovered that you can read hundreds of Archies online.
1Drew, I invite you to write up your feelings on BYU's comics and I will post them here for the world.
1 comment:
Gee Whiz, I hate BYU's comics! They're awful! You would think that a univerty newspaper would credit the intelligence of its audience enough to print something better than the daily one-panel pun called 'Frank and Earnest'! What a miserable excuse for a comic. One panel! One panel!? It really has no need to be illustrated. Every day it's the same picture of two poorly-drawn hobos who's voluminous noses consume two-thirds of the already wasted one panel with a poorly-written pun not worthy of a Laffy Taffy wrapper being desperately stretched to fill the remaining third like a student trying to fill the page requirement on a hand-written essay. And then there's 'Garfield'. Jim Davis at least uses three panels, but I can't understand why. All three are always identical with the infrequent exception that somebody's eyes may be slightly larger in the third panel, or also the possibity that there will be some text, however brief, referring to sleep, lasagna, or John's status as the perfect loser. Which brings me to my next point. These days all comics seem to share the same theme: "a celebration of loser-ness". Seriously, think about it. Both 'Garfield' and 'Get Fuzzy' are about a single guy with no life who talks to his only two companions: a dog who is only slightly less intelligent than he, and a cat who is apparently cooler and more clever than the other two combine. Then there's Charlie Brown of 'Peanuts' (which I love for it's classical value) who probably invented the genre of loser-ness. But nothing's worse than Ziggy, who is really just the adult version of Carlie Brown. the saddest thing is that he is still bald, has forgone the use of pants, looks sufficiently less human than his peers, and has also adopted the habit of talking to not just his cat and dog, but his fish and parrot as well.
What ever happened to brilliant comics like 'Calvin and Hobbes'? It was visually amusing, as it took advantage of the small space it was allowed. It was philisophical. It was abot trying to be awesome and suppressing loser-ness. Boy, I miss those days.
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