All that said, it’s pleasingly audacious for them to have Obama and Palin guest-star in a couple of issues–a gimmick that would seem to be long past its point of viability. (Although it might have been more audacious to have Obama sharing a milkshake with, say, Mitt Romney.) And this could have had the charm you can occasionally see it stretching toward. There was a lot of room for this story to work: devising a plot about Riverdale High politics echoing U.S. politics (think a G-rated version of the movie “Election”) and then bringing actual politicians into it could’ve been really funny. (Imagine if this had been a Simpsons episode!)
But it’s not actually funny the way it’s handled here, with joke after joke flopping straight onto the floor and a premise that zooms past “so stupid it’s brilliant” and circles straight back around to “stupid.” And without functional comedy–and seriously, how hard would it have been to sharpen the edges of a few jokes about politics in here?–all that’s left is an opportunistic “collectible” comic book, with layouts that try to look exciting and end up just looking cluttered, off-model artwork, and cynicism about its readership dripping from its edges.
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EVAN: You know, Douglas, I hear what you’re saying and agree with a lot of it. Yet I can’t bring myself to hate it. Maybe it’s the sharp contrast to the grey, angry place where so much superhero stuff comes from nowadays that’s informing my response. I’ll cop to that.
DOUGLAS: If Archie comics ever end up in that particular grey, angry place… yeah, that would be a big bad problem. (Cf. “Funky Winkerbean.”) But there’s no shortage of mild, light kids’ comics that are actually funny and well-wrought–by Bolling and Stanley and Carl Barks and Dan DeCarlo and Don Rosa and Mark Freaking Millar (Superman Adventures!!) and on and on. I’ve actually been lingering in that particular Bright Happy Place for the last few weeks–looking at the incredible Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, rejoicing that there’s finally going to be a Sugar & Spike Archives. Mere inoffensiveness doesn’t cut it for me.
GRAEME: And today, the part of the Grinch Who Hated Archie will be played by Douglas Wolk.
I fall somewhere in the middle of your two reactions. I didn’t particularly enjoy the issue, but not because of Archie’s identity crisis as a publisher – something I actually find weirdly charming; it’s like your uncle trying to be hip or something – but because it just felt very slight and unnecessarily stretched out so that the Obama/Palin gimmick can be used in two issues (and the next one isn’t out until mid-February?!? That really seems like a bad idea), with this issue feeling more like set-up than anything else. But what little there is here is fun enough, to me: I agree that the political jokes could’ve had more teeth to them, but then it wouldn’t be an Archie comic, if that makes sense… Archie comics are much less in-your-face about everything, especially something as potentially controversial as politics. (Although I’m sure someone, somewhere, will have found countless things worth getting annoyed about in this issue: “Obama doesn’t say that he was born in Kenya anywhere! SHOCK!”)
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I’m with Evan, though, that there are some nice touches, especially around Reggie using Archie’s main character traits against him in the political arena, as smallscale as it would be. This is all plot-centric characterless writing, for the most part – Veronica really felt much more of a parody of herself than I remember from the Archie comics of my youth – but it worked much better than I was expecting, I have to admit.
I’m still disappointed that we didn’t get to see Obama and Palin *actually* share a milkshake, though.