As research for this book, English Professor Bart Beaty read every Archie comic book published by the company during the twelve cent era (from 1961 to 1969) and describes what he consumed in short chapters akin to Archie's six-page stories.
Beaty's thoughts on the company's output is smart, insightful, opinionated, fairly comprehensive, and imminently readable (especially if the reader, like me, has read much of the material he analyzes). Starting with the proposition that much academic appreciation and criticism of comics has slanted towards those works which exhibit the most literary qualities, Beaty rightly argues that more commonplace, workaday, comics-grounded work is just as ripe for, and deserving of, commentary. Topics covered include the no-continuity formula of the stories, their story-serving contradictions, the differing styles of cartoonists Harry Lucey, Samm Schwartz and Dan DeCarlo, the daily newspaper strip, the series' fantasy elements, '60s fads the company pursued, the series' gender politics, and much more.
The content is so comprehensive, it's a shame other Archie decades couldn't have also been covered (Samm Schwartz' best and most sustained work was in the '70s, for example), but that would make the volume too unwieldy and concentrating on one specific decade does allow Beaty to illuminate the era in which, he reports, Archie comics sold the most (it's also the era he was first exposed to as a child). Twelve Cent Archie is highly recommended to casual fans of the world of Riverdale and its denizens.
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