Never too Late to Read Classics discussion

It's ARCHIE!! Need I say more?

Enjoy!!!

We need some fun in our lives right now- I'm in!

I didn't realize Archie went all the way back to the 40s. I'll read some soon.

Sounds good Book Nerd!

I loved Archie comics when I was a kid back in the late 1960s/early '70s. I used to have stacks of them because my aunt's neighbors' kids would buy them and then give them to her to pass on to me when they were done with them. I especially loved Betty and Veronica's clothes. I was really looking forward to going back and revisiting Riverdale, but the Archie series didn't really age well for me. I like the comics from the era I grew up in, but I didn't really like the newer stories, from the mid-'80s and onward. It was a bit of a struggle for me to even finish the book, to be honest. I had heard about the storyline where Archie marries Betty and Veronica, and it was interesting to read part of it, but for me part of the appeal of Archie's world was that they were teenagers forever. Betty was always my favorite character, and I had always hoped that someday she would kick Archie to the curb if he couldn't choose between her and Veronica.

In response to sometimes fierce debates on establishing the temporal boundaries of the so-called “golden age” of science fiction, Peter Graham once wryly observed that “the golden age of science fiction is twelve”, meaning that any person is likely to regard science fiction as being at its best during the period he or she was initially exposed to and grew up with the genre, regardless of when that might be. I imagine much the same is true of Archie. When I think of Archie, I think of the Archie that I read as a preteen in the 60s as drawn by artists such as Dan DeCarlo and Harry Lucey. Reading the entries from that era in The Best of Archie Comics, Book 1 proved a nice trip down memory lane. In the main, I also appreciated those stories drawn from the 40s and 50s. Moving forward in time I found myself struggling a bit with the material (although I was unexpectedly pleased with the 2010 story about Archie’s marriage, “Lodge a Complaint”). For me the real low points of this collection were “A Share of Happening”, a smug, self-congratulatory piece from 1973, and “E.T. Travesty”, a 1983 story that exemplifies the franchise’s unfortunate tendency to occasionally (and clumsily) try to ride the coattails of popular trends. The best stories in the collection (my opinion, of course) were: “Pool Sharks” (1959), “The Long Walk” (1962), and “Measure Up” (1964). Overall, I’m glad that that I took the time to read this book even if the entries were a bit uneven in terms of quality.

✭✭½

I have just read the first story from 1942 and the comics were much better in the 60s. It will be interesting to see how it changes over the years.

The story from 1948 looks a lot more like the Archie Comics I read as a kid.

I read so many of these in late primary school and throughout middle school. I think I also read them into high school. I don’t recall donating shoe boxes full of them until high school. My mom probably liked buying the occasional Archie book for me, because I believe she also read them growing up. Later this month i should jump into reading this one with y’all.

Sidenote: My love of reading so many Archie comics is what made watching CW’s Riverdale so difficult at first. I resisted hard, because I knew it wasn’t anything like Archie comics. Good drama show in its own right, but all they used from the comics are character and place names and some relationships.

The 50s stories were fun. My daughters loved Katy Keene when they were small.

When I used to get the stacks of hand-me-down Archie comics from my aunt's neighbor's kids, there were sometimes other titles mixed in. My favorites were called Millie the Model, or Chilli and Millie? I'm not sure of the exact title-- it was a long time ago. I loved the clothes, and they always had a feature where readers could design and submit clothes for the characters. Does anybody else remember these comics?

Suki, I was a big fan of Millie the Model and design clothes myself.

Rosemarie wrote: "Suki, I was a big fan of Millie the Model and design clothes myself."

I was never much of an artist, but I could sew really well and I got lots of ideas from the Millie comic for my Barbie dolls. 🙂

I started reading the 60s comics and Little Archie appeared after I stopped reading comic books. I went from comic books to fan magazines, featuring The Beatles and The Monkees.
Reading these is a trip down memory lane-including the song by The Archies.

I have just finished the book and enjoyed the older comics more than the post 2000 comics. It was a fun read!

I only read a little of this stuff when I was a kid.
So far I've read the 40s and 50s.
Those older comics look really weird. Jughead looks old and Archie wants to be called "Chick" lol.
I'm surprised so many of them aren't actually Archie comics.

I noticed that too.

Book Nerd said (in part):

I'm surprised so many of them aren't actually Archie comics.

I was looking at a Wikipedia article that purported to be an incomplete listing of the many Archie Comics titles released over the decades. There were over 100 and perhaps less than a half had the word “Archie” in the title.

I actually wish this month’s graphic novel had had more in the way of introductory material expounding on the history and evolution of Archie and the various Archie magazines. I remember, for example, reading Pep as a preteen, but by that time it was a magazine focusing exclusively on humor; I never knew until much later that it had started life as a superhero anthology of sorts.

I finished.
Like everybody I liked the stories at the end less. A lot of them just leave you hanging. And when the text referred to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover I was hoping that would be in there!