Jughead Double Digest #194
Mix of new and old stories
Writers and artists: Various
Archie Comics, $3.99, color, 160 pages
On a lark, I read a review copy of this book, thinking that I would probably find it painful to read the adventures of healthy teens who are still in the prime of life, while I have aged almost 40 years since I last regularly read them. I found to my surprise that the opposite was true.
It's a fact that I stopped reading Archies when I reached their age in the mid-1970s, because I discovered that Riverdale High School and White Station High School in Memphis, Tenn., had virtually nothing in common. And I haven't read them since, thinking that the farther I got from high school the less interested I'd be in antics that didn't even represent real high-school experiences, but instead faux ones in a weird universe where the majority of a town's population seems to be teenagers, where everything from snow skiing to a white-sand beach is a short drive away, where everybody likes everybody else (even Reggie) and where nobody ages.
But to my delight, immersing myself in Riverdale again triggered what psychologists call "episodic memory," where instead of analyzing everything intellectually I instead found myself re-experiencing the same happy emotional reaction I had when reading Archies almost four decades ago. And I found myself leaving Riverdale reluctantly at the end of the last story.
And that's pretty amazing, especially given the sheer size of this book. Whatever else you can say about Jughead Double Digest, it's a terrific value. It contains 22 Jughead stories (one a four-part time-travel epic), two "That Wilkins Boy" stories (drawn by Dan DeCarlo) and a couple of one-page gags.
The first two stories appear to be new, by writer Craig Boldman and artist Rex Lindsey, and to my surprise, were probably the best of the lot. Lindsey does a mean Dan DeCarlo impersonation, so you'll get no complaints from me. And Boldman really "gets" Jughead, my favorite Archie character, whose lack of interest in women can be written badly (misogyny) or zany (he's just eccentric). Boldman goes the latter route in "Missed Kiss," in which he plays against expectation, as Jughead kisses every girl in town (to everyone's consternation) because he's on a quest to find a lipstick he accidentally found tasty! Upshot is that he doesn't mind kissing girls at all, it's just that romance comes in second place to his enormous appetite. That's my Juggie! (I also find it fascinating that every gorgeous girl in town is perfectly willing to kiss Jughead -- Jughead! -- simply because he asks them to. Oh, to be 17 and live in Riverdale!)
The third story is also by Boldman but with a different artist, and I can't tell if it's new or not, but it's still in the top 3 in this book. Then come the reprints, which are a mixed bag.
I still find anything drawn by Samm Schwartz to be "my" Jughead, so the two or three stories by Schwartz here (likely from the '70s) gets my stamp of approval. There are some others by Stan Goldberg and others, probably from the '80s and '90s, that are only OK. And at least two are marred by being stuck in time; one by awful '60s clothes (nice psychedelic vest there, Reggie) and another by centering on the kung-fu craze of the 1970s. I'm not saying those stories are bad; they are at the very least entertaining. But it's hard not to be aware that they're at least 30 years out of date.
One other discomfort worth mentioning occurs in a lengthy story about Jughead and the Time Police, part of a series of stories (or maybe an actual series?) I vaguely remember reading about but not actually reading. The weird thing here is that apparently Juggie has a girlfriend in the future. Juggie having a girlfriend at all, much less one in Canada in the future, is weird on the face of it, but even odder is that the girl is a descendent of Archie named Marshal January McAndrews ... who looks just like Archie, only with boobs. I'm no homophobe, but watching Jughead kiss an Archie lookalike, who is sometimes drawn in sexy poses (for Archie comics) is a bit ... well, unsettling. I've never had erotic thoughts about Archie before, and I don't want to start now!
All in all, though, Jughead Double Digest #194 was a nice sojourn in Riverdale, and now that I've rediscovered my love for these characters, it won't be my last.
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