This Recording - The Past

Diary Of An Archie Fanatic

by Molly Lambert

Alex and I have our birthday coming up. It's this Saturday, September 13th. We will be one year older and none the wiser.

One of the many things Alex and I have in common is a shared love of Archie Comics. Archie is so square it becomes subversive by sheer force of consistent squareness. Jughead is a gay beatnik who hates working and women and especially working women.

I clearly remember a reprint in an Archie digest from the seventies about Women's Lib; Betty and Veronica join up, Arch and Jug get all freaked out, and then B & V realize Women's Lib is for humorless lesbos and drop out to go watch they boys do dumb stuff at Pop's Chocklit Shoppe some more.

The love triangle between Archie, Betty, and Veronica is the eternal struggle between Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, although in this case Jackie is the blonde and Marilyn brunette. Nothing is hotter than Archie fanfic. Nothing.

Once I bought some Archie comics at a bookstore and they accidentally undercharged me by several dollars. Catholic-Jew that I am, I went back to pay the correct balance. In retrospect I see this was stupid. I should should've taken the free Archies. Life doesn't always rain down free Archies on a body.

The Archie Comics website is perfectly bootleg. This is clearly a labor of love or forced work for minimum wages. Either way, it is awesome. It captures everything I enjoy about classic Archie, and updates it for the twenty-first century.