Archie Sunday: It's Twins!

/

Sheesh, Archie Comics, spoiler alert! By putting "It's twins!" on the cover, you are effectively removing any suspense this comic may have provided otherwise.

This is the third installment in the What If Archie Marries Veronica? storyline that has captured the hearts of dreamers everywhere.  It's been moving at a breakneck pace, with Archie proposing in the first issue, marrying her in the second issue, and becoming a father in the third. Where else can it go from here? We'll get to the (unsurprising) conclusion in a minute.

But first, let's break down a bit of this issue, which, much like the other two issues of this series, were riddled with unfunny jokes, confusing and overly-complicated scenarios, and fairly lousy art. And these, frankly, are not what I expect to find in an Archie comic.

We can start with the young couple telling Archie's parents that they are going to be grandparents soon. Mrs Andrews is thrilled, while Dad seems happy, but is also concerned about whether or not Archie is ready to responsibly raise a child (or two! Spoiler!). Archie says the right thing to his dad to reassure him:

Ok, maybe Archie's dad missed this piece of information somewhere, but Archie married Veronica Lodge, whose father is richer than God. I don't really think a college fund is necessary. Couldn't Archie just dump a million dollars in an account somewhere right now? Does he really need to save on a long-term plan?

Anyway, before the Andrews family can further discuss unnecessary plans, the ol' Riverdale gang busts through the door with some ridiculous promises:

Where the hell is Dilton? He could actually teach the kid something useful. "I'll train him to be sneaky"? Oh, Reggie. This is all you have to show for your life. I do like Jughead's shirt, though. And Moose's zigzag-front jacket.

Archie and Veronica head over to Daddy Lodge's house, where he sorta proves my point about the college fund thing.

Now here's the thing: with both parents the topic of university for the kid comes up, but there is nothing tying these two conversations together. I don't even think the writer realized what he did.

Off to prenatal classes!

Archie and Veronica get a psychotic nurse teaching the class:

To be fair to Archie, those were barely jokes at all.

Veronica comes down with a cold later on, so Jughead fills in for her at a future birthing class. I don't think it's necessary for him to wear the pillow. Or to do any of this:

When the big day finally does come, Archie is so flustered he leaves for the hospital without Veronica!

Veronica is so cool about it. I hope I'm that calm when my own baby drops. Too bad Archie counters Ron's coolness by uttering a very creepy sentence in the following panel.

WHAT. IS. PLAN. B, ARCHIE?!

They get to the hospital ok, and the family plus Jughead, who still looks kinda pregnant, gather in the waiting room. They spend a few panels trying to guess the gender of the baby, but of course the readers already know it's TWINS!

Finally they get to find out that the baby is TWO BABIES! And they are 2-years old!

Now, Veronica is very wealthy, so I assume she would have a pretty decent medical team working on this pregnancy. So I really can't believe that she didn't know she was having twins.

This issue ends with a bunch of melodramatic crap, including TWO FULL PANELS of Archie reading Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken in its entirety to his kids at bedtime. And then on Christmas night he goes for a walk and ends up at the forked road where he found himself  at the beginning of this series. He walks the ROAD NOT TAKEN and guess what:

I think we all saw this coming. I am looking forward to Veronica being a real bitch about this development. And then maybe it will be followed by ARCHIE MARRIES JUGHEAD!

John Buys Comics and Oh Man I'm so Hungry I Can't Think Up a Title

/

Three things from last week, as I did not get my ass in gear in time to write much of anything:

a) The Anchor No.1 - A fine entry in the “big dude who punches the supernatural” style that I love so much. I’ll pick up numba two and go into more detail then.

b) Hector Plasm: Totentanz - Really fantastic. I shall be tracking down the earlier Hector Plasm collection. Chris Sims hit all of my major points in his review of the book, so go read that and imagine that at the end I pipe in with a muted “Yeah.”

c) Hellboy: The Wild Hunt No. 5 - Holy crap! So great. Don’t wait for the trade on this series, guys. The last issue is in a couple of weeks, so watch out for me spewing praise in this space.

Four! Four things!

d) Grandville - Okay, this came out a couple of weeks ago but I just read it. It’s amazing, on about a hundred levels. The art is marvelous and amazingly detailed, the characters are well-realized and compelling, the giant fight scenes are actually followable and not a tangle of limbs that must be worked out like a magic eye puzzle. Add in some terrific shout-outs to Hergé and the Rupert comics and such and it’s just a delight to read. Non-comics-reading Erica (and every time I use her as an example her designation as such gets a little flimsier, I realize) got at least as worked up about how good this was as she did about the resistance that some of my workmates have to vaccination (if you know a doctor and you want to take a break from talking for a while, just ask them their opinions on such things - fun!). Anyone who enjoys adventure-style comics should check this out, if only in-store.

Dang it, five things. Batman No. 691 turned me off enough that there’s going to be a six hundred and ninety-SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT.

Now, on to this week:

Cowboy, Ninja, Viking No. 1

So it’s a recognized thing (by me, at least. Maybe you weren't paying attention or something) that over the last decade or so all of the classic character archetypes of our childhoods have been fermented and distilled on the Internet until things like Talk Like a Pirate Day or Zombie Walks spill out into the non-electronic world. And of course they bleed into comics as well - Dr McNinja, say, or Scurvy Dogs - often enough nowadays that you can start to get a bit wary when something is described as “Monkeys versus Ninjas… Zombie Ninjas! On the Moon!” Is it going to be good reading or did someone get a bit lazy and just throw concepts together until it sounded marketable?

I point this out to illustrate my state of mind when I saw that there was an upcoming comic called Cowboy Ninja Viking: wary and guarded. Man, these are three of the classic stock characters - was someone just picking names out of a hat in an attempt to entrap folks like me? My brow furrowed further when I read the plot synopsis: a guy with Multiple Personality Disorder who had three personalities - the titular Cowboy, Ninja and Viking - and who had been trained as an assassin by an ill-conceived government program. This was either going to be great or terrible.

Happily, it’s looking like it’s going to be pretty great. The art has the necessary chops (and check out that cover image - very nice) and the set-up was taken care of without spilling into issue 2. There were a few too many jumps in time for my taste - the lack of a full colour palette tended to make things like changes of location a bit hard to follow and forced me to flip back and forth a fair deal to resolve exactly what was going on and who was talking and so forth. The use of iconic word balloons to differentiate the CNV’s personalities was very, very cool. There’ll be a SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT on this one, but honestly it’s just because I’d like to wait and check out the characterization a bit more before jumping in with both feet.

Oh, to hell with caution. The main character is a cowboy AND a ninja AND a Viking, after all - this is probably going to be awesome.

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance No 6 (of 6)

So RUN! dealt with the issue of the Human Flame and his continued evasion of justice (by making him super-powerful, having him defeat himself by his own hubris and ending up with him imprisoned on an asteroid), Escape tackled the finality of Final Crisis (by reinstating the Global Peace Agency as an extradimensional/extratemporal organization dedicated to heading off Crises before they occur), Ink is dedicated to either hazing the new Tattooed Man until he becomes a villain again or proving his heroism through a super-duper baptism of fire. What about Dance?

The Super Young Team were one of the more fun elements of Final Crisis, at least for me, and I was all for this series, whose goal seemed to be establishing them as heroes rather than just super-powered club kids. And that’s basically what happened, I guess. Kind of. Not really. Actually, not at all.

According to this issue, the Super Young Team has learned to work together and have found their places in the world and yadda yadda. As far as I can tell, though… there have been no actual changes in the characters (in fact, there’s been a bit of a reversion, since Big Atomic Lantern Boy screwed up his budding relationship with Shiny Happy Aquazon and is back to pining for her). There is no visible evidence to support the fact that the team has changed in the least.

I get that this series has been an overt examination of the celebrity aspect of super-herodom and that the characters must thus be infused with shallowness and soap opera and so forth but GAWD was it unsatisfying to read six issues and end up liking the characters less at the end. Intentional of not, I say bleah to that. Bleah.

Beasts of Burden No. 2 - I have no desire to ruin one second of this comic for anyone. All I’ll say about it is that as many horror comics as I read (and I read a lot of horror comics) this is the first one in quite a while to genuinely creep me out. I won’t be awake all night or anything, mind, but I did get that creepy feeling. Just a fantastic comic on all levels. Especially Mr. Pugsley: “Devil’s Well, huh? More like Devil’s Ass. This place sucks.”

Oops, didn't get anything else read. Good night everybody!

The JLA hits the streets in style!

/

Now I believe, left to right, that we are looking at Green Lantern, The Flash, Aquaman, Batman, Superman, The Atom and Hawkman.

And now, left to right, I will review what they are wearing.

Green Lantern

If you were the Green Lantern, and your super hero costume was a high-collared green top and some black pants, would you choose to wear a green turtleneck and black pants for your street clothes? Basically he is only missing the flimsy domino mask here. That's a poor disguise, Hal.

The Flash

Ah, Barry Allen. A man of no style. Or, at least, a man of very conservative style.

Actually, I say that, but if I saw a man wearing a yellow or gold three-piece suit, I would think it was pretty daring.

Aquaman

As if it even matters what anyone else is wearing because the only guy you are going to notice in this crowd is Aquaman. This daring number seems to boast "Hey, Green Arrow, THIS is how you wear a lace-up shirt." It's possible, of course, that Aquaman really has no idea what "street clothes" are. And who could blame him?

Superman

We can't see Clark Kent from the neck down here, but let's assume he's wearing an over-sized, rumpled affair that his mom bought him. Or we can pretend that he is hiding behind Bruce Wayne because he is embarrassed to be wearing the same outfit as Aquaman. Whatever you prefer.

Batman

Ladies and gentlemen, Bruce MF Wayne. Here's a man who looks like a million bucks, because he spent a million bucks on his coat. And this really works as a disguise because you wouldn't look at this guy and think "I'll bet he's Batman." You think "I'll bet Batman wants to be this guy."

The Atom

We can't really see what The Atom is wearing. In fact, I am not even sure that is The Atom. I just assume it is. It could just be some guy running for the train who got caught up in the JLA posse at this exact moment.

Hawkman

So what has caught Hawkman's attention? An attractive lady perhaps? A police siren? I would actually guess that it's his own reflection in a shop window, because he looks so damn gooooood. He's just strutting down the street, singing his private themesong in his head ("Hawkman is swinging, Hawkman is swinging, Hawkmaaaaaan... Hawkman swinging") wondering if he should maybe undo another button. The fact that he's wearing a shirt at all, and not wearing wings and a hawk mask, makes this a pretty good disguise.

Panel taken from Justice League of America v.1 #89, one of the most insane and self-indulgent comics ever written.