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Archive: Archie

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Absorb me, surround me in your sweet sweet comfort, oohhhh yeah

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Archie, 7/31/13

One of my favorite Idle Comics-Reading Pastimes involves trying to figure out the original publication date of any given stretch of Archie newspaper comics reruns. The use of Beanie Babies as a cultural touchstone places this one pretty firmly in the mid 1990s. Along the way, the strip also reveals the shortcomings of the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000’s linear humor-logic. Presumably its legal module made sure that it used the generic “bean bags” instead of the registered trademark “Beanie Babies,” a formulation that I’m pretty sure no actual human ever uttered. This leads into a distasteful punchline about Jughead making sweet love to whatever soft, cushy surface is most capable of enabling his extreme laziness.

Hi and Lois, 7/31/13

The bedroom eyes Hi and Lois are making at each other here imply that this “dressing up” banter isn’t so much about “weren’t things better in the ’50s, when women’s autonomy was strictly limited” so much as it’s about “I’d sure find it sexually arousing if I came home to find you dressed sexily, for sex.” It’s a weird conversation to have right in front of the kids at the kitchen table, but it’s also weird to have the kitchen table three feet away from the front door of your house, so who am I to question how they do things in this family.

Herb and Jamaal, 7/31/13

Ha ha, but wouldn’t it be funny if the depictions of U.S. statesmen on our currency were sentient beings? “Oh, God, I’ve been smothered in there for an eternity! At last, I can breathe again! Wait … what … are you feeding me into some infernal machine? NO PLEASE I BEG OF YOU NOOMMMphhh”

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“Now his fortune is MINE, ALL MINE, er, I mean, I was very sad, yes, sad”

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Archie, 7/22/13

Wow, I thought Jughead was a compulsive eater because he needed to fill the hole inside him where emotional intimacy should be, but apparently there’s this whole other twisted sadism angle to it too! Notice that Jughead isn’t just condemning this delicious burrito to a gory execution in his mouth, but rather to indefinite detention and torture in his digestive tract, casting himself in the role of some kind of mobile Sarlacc Pit. Does he chuckle to himself, imagining the poor burrito slowly being dissolved in his stomach, screaming in agony and begging for a quicker death? The long string of saliva dribbling from his mouth in panel two adds to the horror. Archie and Betty are right to leave him alone during this disturbing episode.

Family Circus, 7/22/13

I think the thing that bothers me most about Billy’s latest smug-bomb is not that he believes his thoughts are actually valuable, but that he’s dropped the first syllable from “economy,” like he thinks that’s cute or something. “Sorry, grandma, but in this ’conomy we don’t have time to pronounce ‘economy.’ There are valid reasons for this, but if you want to find out what they are, you’re gonna have to pay me.”

Mary Worth, 7/22/13

Hey, Mary, I don’t want to tell you how to live your life or anything, but when you’re saying “I remember when I became a widow … it seems like it was only yesterday,” probably you shouldn’t be rubbing your hands together gleefully.

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I’d be pretty depressed listening to “Turkey In The Straw” for ten blocks, I guess

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Heathcliff, 7/15/13

Last week’s Heathcliff fish joke, while well within the expected whimsy-parameters of an inoffensive long-running legacy comic, still adhered to a basic logic, that logic being “cats like stealing fish, to eat.” Today’s panel provides something more in line with the profound weirdness bubbling below the surface of this feature’s modern iteration. Cats like fish, and I suppose cats like “playing with their food,” when their food is alive, but instead here the tenuous conceptual cat-fish connection produced a scenario where Heathcliff has a collection of fish of varying densities that he uses as athletic equipment. How dead are these fish, anyway? Are they still floppy? Do they hit the ball with a meaty smack, or have they started to rot, with contact with any projectile producing a cloud of scattered fish-flesh? Or … maybe, as I imagined last week, we’re meant to interpret the fish’s open eyes as meaning that it is still alive, which makes its bemused facial expression all the more hilarious. “Oh, now the cat’s using me as a baseball bat. That’s fantastic, just fantaaaastic.”

Archie, 7/15/13

The current run of Newspaper Archie Reruns From The Late ’90s Or Maybe The Early ’00s has actually involved a continuing plot that’s running over multiple weeks, which is kind of a new one, though not new in the sense of these strips actually being new, obviously. Anyway, Ronnie’s cruel father made her get a job! Obviously this job just became another venue for her long-running battle with Betty over Archie’s dubious charms. Which I guess is bumming him out? Look at how miserable Archie looks in panel two! I’ve never seen him sadder! And this is before he finds out that Veronica is stalking him with potentially malicious intent. Maybe he’s just sad that she gets access to all that delicious ice cream and he doesn’t?

Beetle Bailey, 7/15/13

As we already know, Camp Swampy exists in an pocket universe in which a single, awful day keeps on happening, forever. Dimly aware of the nightmarish nature of his reality, Beetle is attempting, through this conceptual artwork, to convey the horror of his damned existence.