Everything's Archie

I just want to call attention to some Archie-comics related articles that I didn't mention when they first appeared:

- This long, sympathetic and entertaining article from Vanity Fair about 65 years of Archie and how it's managed to stay popular for so long.

- Scott Shaw! writes about the issue of "Archie's Mad House" where Sabrina, the Teenage Witch first appeared, and reproduces the first Sabrina story (written by George Gladir and drawn by Dan DeCarlo). You'll notice two things about it. First, that many of the details are lifted from the play and movie Bell, Book and Candle: the idea that witchse can't cry and that they lose their powers if they fall in love (this was abandoned when Sabrina became a regular series). Second, that the original conception of Sabrina was much more sophisticated than it originally became -- like Bell, Book and Candle and many similar witch comedies, it presented witches as a breed apart from ordinary humans, cooler and hipper.

- A blog post from last year about perhaps the best Archie artist, Harry Lucey -- his artwork and poses were much funnier than Dan DeCarlo, and while Samm Schwartz was the funniest of all, Lucey was more versatile.

While Archie comics are anachronistic (heck, they were already anachronistic when they started), there's been a lot of good work done in its pages over the year: Lucey, Bob Bolling, Frank Doyle and Samm Schwartz did consistently funny and entertaining stories, and I'm glad to see that the work they (and others) did is starting to get more attention.