#bart beaty

[club-blossom]

Archie’s creators in the 1960s were not interested in expressing the truth of their characters or in the inconsistencies that varying stories would produce. Rather, they were concerned with spinning out an endless stream of content that remained true to the spirit of the Archie universe. Story logics are circumstantial, and they stem from the collision of characters that retain a roughly fixed form with an endlessly generative series of new story prompts that can be infinitely recycled until they have been exhausted of comic potential.

- Bart Beaty, Twelve Cent Archie

[jhsharman]

Pony Tail Tales

Bob Montana's comic strip set off in its own universe, but this sees Betty experimenting with her future (just becoming current?) hair style. It could be one origin. The comic books came up with its own origin story.

Not entirely accurate, Bart Beaty and Twelve Cent Archie, not even within the twelve cent period covered (her old hair does not vanish overnight -- in one instance fluctuated in and out in the story). But funny to see the short hair Betty dons before the hair style choice -- at least in the micro-universe of this story.

Here is one time Veronica had a ponytail.

Strange choice. What accounts for it, I can't say.

Overstreet marked a “Betty's 1st ponytail” appearance with AGB&V #6 from 1952. Neither here nor there as what I'd want to know is some idea of a codification instead of a weird a bloop in time. Interestingly, it is an early Decarlo story. A later edition marks the 1st ponytail at AGB&V #3. Ironically, that story has her move to a ponytail as change of personality -- as she is through with Archie so lets herself go -- it is that bad breath story. If that figures as a ponytail.

[theoutcastrogue]

Crime books, comics and other stories packed with criminal activity and presented in such a way as to glorify crime and the criminal may be dangerous, particularly in the hands of an unstable child. A comic book which is replete with the lurid and macabre; which places the criminal in a unique position by making him a hero; which makes lawlessness attractive; which ridicules decency and honesty; which leaves the impression that graft and corruption are necessary evils of American life; which depicts the life of the criminal as exciting and glamorous may influence the susceptible boy or girl who already possesses anti-social tendencies.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, at the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in 1950, being entirely unoriginal and of course entirely wrong

cited in Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2005)

[club-blossom]

Most importantly, of course, she is the “nice girl” in the Betty and Veronica pairing. She is loyal, honest, and essentially decent, and these qualities account for the fact that she is fundamentally better liked by the readership than is Veronica. She is the ideal girl next door, and Archie’s failure to recognize her many charms is frequently held to be his greatest failing. Betty Cooper has everyone fooled.

- Bart Beaty, Twelve Cent Archie

[club-blossom]

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.

- Bart Beaty, Twelve Cent Archie

[jhsharman]

Chicken in a Basket

Apostrophe. Hyphen. "A Girl's Basketball Team?". Oh, the horrors!

This is a story I have referenced here before as one of the notably ridiculously sexist (and... er... not in a manner that entertains) stories. See Bart Betty in Twelve Cent Archie.

A prior paragraph ends in a question.

That premise plays out to punchline a number of times, I am reasonably certain including in the time period of comic books read and examined by Beaty, so I guess it is rhetorical.

Coach Van Clutch shows up in a few more stories, not named -- and notably the next appearance has her exasperated in coaching a disinterested volleyball team who only become interested when the girls see their competition stole their uniform design. Or, drop it in as a thematic companion to this -- I don't understand why Beaty does not bring it up there. Otherwise and elsewhere, we have Coach Van Clutch coming onto Coach Kleats as side-gags.

Stupid experience in high school p.e.: a fairly lax day, just have the basketball court open for everyone. I can't get in a game so I am sitting in the bleachers. And the p.e. teacher snarls at me and throws me together with a few typically unathletic and disinterested girls. We sort of just walk around and I am comically dominating the game -- short of nerfball basketball with four to seven year old nephews the one time I can say that. I don't know -- maybe had they stripped down they might just distract me as I make "boing" noises and beat me, but therein lay a problem with the story -- at least "Volley Dollies" plays to their apathy.

[club-blossom]

While outrageous slapstick violence was a hallmark of Archie comics, particularly those crafted by Frank Doyle and Harry Lucey, it is the murderous intent that is unusual here... Yet, in this case, Betty moves from charmingly cute Archie stalker to criminally dangerous Archie obsessive. It is a far cry from the popular misconception of the character as the innocent naif next door and one of the fundamental textual misreadings of the Archie comics of the twelve-cent era.

- Bart Beaty, Twelve Cent Archie

[club-blossom]

Archie Andrews is an atypical comic-book protagonist. He is a young man to whom things happen; he is not someone who makes things happen. Only rarely is he the central actor in any of the plots in which he is involved. Only on occasion is he the character who takes the first action. In character terms, he is actually little more than a cipher—a blank space on which stories are written.

- Bart Beaty, Twelve Cent Archie