Everything’s Archie (4 of 5)

Cruelty, thy name is Archie.

Look, we all understand comic books in general and funny books in particular are prone to grossly overexaggerate real life situations.

There’s a reason superheroes and funny animals are the two most prevalent genres.

In the case of Archie, the earliest stories stayed within I Love Lucy bounds of plausibility. 

The scenarios were farfetched but usually with some touchstone in reality, the payoff outlandish by not physically impossible.

The Archieverse very quickly exceeded those boundaries.  By the late 1940s the stories frequently dealt with outrageous degrees of physical / mental / emotional torment.

While the current creative teams deserve credit for trying to blunt and undo the worse offenses of the Golden / Silver Age Archie comics, there’s no deny the underlying sadism running through many of them.

We’re talking initiations with spankings by heavy wooden paddles (apparently a thing in the 1940s), characters (usually Archie) stripped naked in public, fistfights and bodyslams, assaults with deadly weapons, automotive shenanigans on par with a Mad Max movie, and characters regularly sent to hospital ICUs.

Pretty terrible, huh?  But that’s not sadism, that’s sadomasochism, an internal give and take among the characters.  The sadism of which I speak is cruelty for the sake of cruelty on a relatively defenseless victim.

Archie Comics typically use the visual equivalent of a laugh track when doing their single page / panel gags:  Somebody says or does something stupid and everybody else in the frame laughs uproariously with eyes squinched shut, mouth wide open to tell the reader it’s okay to ridicular that big dumb os.

And who is that somebody?

Meet Maramaduke “Moose” Mason, the Archieverse’s resident jock.

The Archies treat Moose cruelly.  Good lord, he should have killed all of them a dozen times over by now.  They mock and berate him for his cognitive disability, pulling selfish pranks on him, laughing as he struggles with class assignments.  He is long suffering, almost never realizing he’s the butt of their jokes, never really retaliating against those who shame and ridicule him.*

There have been attempts to retcon him, to lighten this cruelty by establishing he’s severely dyslexic.  While that’s a good step in the right direction it doesn’t alter the fact he’s been the Archieverse’s second favorite punching bag.

Their number one target?

Ethel Muggs a.k.a. Big Ethel.

Her earliest appearances leaned heavily into the “big” side of the equation.  She wasn’t obese but she was taller than most characters and of a stockier build.  Like Moose, she appeared originally written as neurodivergent to one degree or another.  Created as a foil for Jughead, she originally pursued him with the same shy, restrained demeanor of the Terminator.

She terrified Jughead and the rest of the cast laughed at her outlandish beaver-toothed appearance, lack of sophistication, and intellectual shortcomings.

Over the years her pursuit of Jughead never faltered, but she expanded her range to fantasize about hooking up with other guys.**

In the early 1970s regular Archie’s artist Al Hartley secured the rights to use the Archieverse characters in a line of Christian theme comics best known under the Spire Comics line.  For the first time she got stories that explored her character and personality.

Hartley depicted her as the morally / spiritually worse of the lot.

While other Archieverse characters in the Spire line proudly proclaimed their chastity and sobriety, Big Ethel went searching for opportunities.

Insofar as she was treated like crap by almost every other Archieverse character, is it any surprise she’d be tempted to find something --anything! -- to kill the heartbreaking loneliness and pain of daily existence?

Again, to their credit, Archie Comics finally started tempering her appearance.  The big beaver teeth receded and eventually disappeared behind her lips, her height receded and her physique -- while never as voluptuous as Betty or Veronica’s -- became more realistic, turning her from a grotesque caricature of femineity into a more realistic gawky teen.

She even got to go on a date with Archie, dressed nicely and rewarded with a kiss at the end.***

© Buzz Dixon

*  But what about his relationship with Midge, you ask?  Stay tuned for part 5, kiddees.

** To his character’s credit, while Jughead wanted nothing to do emotionally with Big Ethel, he did feel protective of her and occasionally stepped in to prevent others from tormenting her.  The powers that be at Archie Comics never wanted Jughead to be romantically involved with any other character, a pity since there’s a one-time-only appearance by a tomboyish character named Judy who befriends Jughead that’s almost heartbreaking.

*** That would be sweet except to unstated message is if a female isn’t meeting male expectations of beauty and appearance, she is unworthy of attention.