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Twelve-Cent Archie by Bart Beaty

2016; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 42; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.2016.0034

1913-4835

Neale Barnholden,

Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies

Reviewed by: Twelve-Cent Archie by Bart Beaty Neale Barnholden Bart Beaty. Twelve-Cent Archie New Brunswick: Rutgers up, 2015. 234pp. $26.95. The question that begins this book, "What is the value of Archie comics?" (3), has a clear answer in the title: not very much. This is probably the answer that most scholars and cultural commentators would have given until very recently. From the viewpoint of 2015, the company, Archie Comics, has surprisingly become "one of the biggest risk-takers in mainstream comics, pushing character diversity in its main titles and shifting away from its all-ages roots" (Sava). Bart Beaty's new volume in Rutgers up's Comics Culture series, however, focuses not on recent developments in the Archie line of comics but, rather, on the "ordinary" all-ages roots of Archie that makes their risk-taking in the twenty-first century surprising. Beaty's project was to read every issue of Archie from the period when most Archie Comics publications cost $.12 an issue—late 1961 until the middle of 1969. As Beaty points out, this period coincides with several notable Archie artists, represents a time when Archie consistently outsold more classically notable comic books (such as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Fantastic Four), and was also a period of volatile change in American culture that passed distinctly unseen in Archie's fictional hometown of Riverdale. The resulting analysis has surprising implications far beyond the realm of cheap old Archie comics. [End Page 178] Bart Beaty, a comics scholar in the Department of English at the University of Calgary who is also possessed of a curiously Archie-esque name, is well aware that comic book analysis, much like literary criticism as a whole, has "focused nearly exclusively on those works that can be most easily reconciled within the traditions of literary greatness … or those of contemporary cultural politics" (5). Twelve-Cent Archie, by contrast, is extremely repetitive, barely innovative, singularly unambitious, and deliberately, painfully uninterested in representing or engaging with the times in which it was produced. Noting the passion of Archie comics for the banjo, an instrument whose heyday had passed long before the 1960s, Beaty sums up the corpus of Twelve-Cent Archie with one word: unhip (197). Beaty's book is patterned after an Archie comics digest: a long sequence of texts arranged in no particular order, concerning different subjects, and of varying length and structure. The methodology deployed varies as well, from a close reading of a particular page to a history of The Archies, the bubblegum pop band with the Archie brand licence at the end of the 1960s, and from an economic analysis of the Archie-Betty-Veronica love triangle to a Norton Anthology–style gloss on cryptic cultural references. Running throughout this variety of Beaty's looks at Twelve-Cent Archie is the constant tension between understanding Archie in terms of classical literary value and grappling with Archie on its own terms. When Beaty looks at Archie as a text in the same way that one might look at, say, Renaissance drama, the results are disheartening but predictable. Archie comics literally never portrayed African-Americans, which is perhaps a blessing given their portrayal of Asians and Asian-Americans. Archie Comics promoted a reactionary view of youth culture in the 1960s, disdainful even of the Beatles brand of innovation, and was positively engaged with current events only in the realm of fashion. Relatedly and most of all, Archie comics promote a rigid view of gender roles, prescribing, at times directly, what female readers should do with their lives and their bodies. These critiques are worth making, but all of these points are also fairly evident to anyone with a vague sense of Archie comics. At least one of them, the revealing detail that Betty and Veronica have identical faces and are arguably interchangeable, was made as early as 1954, in the classic mad magazine parody "Starchie." Beaty finds instead that the quality and innovation of the comics in this period lies in the visual art of Archie comics. As he skilfully explains with a close reading, stories like 1961's "The Joke" (discussed on pages 192–95) and 1969...