InsaneJournal

Delcat Delcat (delcat) wrote in spork_squad, @ 2010-04-22 02:54:00

Current mood:

good

ARCHIE'S PARABLES, PART I
Delcat: Okay, kids, the short version is this: A crazy fundie that also happened to be an Archie artist got permission to do crazy fundie Archie comics that were published alongside regular Archie comics, much to the consternation of readers. The long version is here and is a lengthy but fascinating read. Don't go wandering off there yet, though, we've got a short but stupid and dong-laden read for you right here!
Zeiss: Now I've always thought that Archie was goddamned surreal even when secular, so I'm taking the time to mentally prepare myself right now.
Delcat: It is truly a trippy experience. Believe me, I had one of these things as a kid and I never quite got it.



Delcat: Not that I'm referring to the laser-snorting dragons or the choking pelicans or the floating shocked heads or anything, mind, that's just comics in the 70's for you.
Zeiss: Why orange drink and absinthe don't mix.
Delcat: This cover reminds me of looking at the covers of NES games as a kid. I didn't own the console, so I didn't know what the games were like and imagined all of these crazy amazing adventures, but then years later I got an emulator and the games that looked the brightest and best turned out to be stagnant four-color platformers. They were rarely as good as what was on the box.
Zeiss: I'll concede that most of this stuff qualifies as "whimsical", but the giant flying Goldfish? Archie as Rod Stewart as Oscar the Grouch? Wonking a stork in the skull with a spaceship? Some sort of freakish Archie blow-up doll?
Delcat: You look at this, and you imagine spacemen riding dragons in WWI and being awarded congressional medals of honor by pelicans, but no, no, it's just haphazard fundie crap.
Delcat: Don't forget the fact that the pelican is cooking meth. There's nothing whimsical there. Pelican Meth: Not even once.
Zeiss: Oh yeah, it is a pelican. The giant mountain of Cheez-Whiz distracted me.
Delcat: I don't often go in this direction, but I must say the composition in the lower-right corner makes it look like Scientist Dude is going "I JUST SHAT ARCHIE'S HEAD. OUT OF MY ASS. HAH."



Delcat: Testament to the cheap production value of these things, you can see that the newsprint rubs off faster than a teenager with a box of Hustlers.
Zeiss: So Archie's going to will himself immortal and meet with Jesus every hundred years? Is that the plot? 'Cause between this and the cover I'm getting some Sandman vibes.
Delcat: I dunno, was Sandman drawn exclusively in Sharpie? Because I'm getting some hallucinogenic marker vibes.
Zeiss: "Don't mention the dragon's back tumor, though, he's pretty touchy about it."
Delcat: The more obvious question is what Jughead is actually saying is too dangerous, considering there's no way he could see the poster from that angle. I like to think Archie has his foot in the forge as we speak.
Delcat: I would say that Jughead's also being too dramatic, but it appears that three exclamation points have formally usurped the period in this crazy mixed-up world.
Zeiss: Last panel: Half helmet, half head-gumballer!
Delcat: It looks more like his face was chiseled out of a bowling ball at birth. Hatch, Reggie, hatch! You can do it! Come into the light!
Delcat: Shit, those exclamation points are catching.
Zeiss: "!!!" is the Archie equivalent of "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH", I take it.
Delcat: Second panel, far left: The giant aphid is as shocked as anyone at this plot development.
Delcat: Which is difficult, given those "say WHAAAAAAAAA" expressions.
Zeiss: Man, that pelican must have been supplying everybody.



Delcat: Man, Prince Valiant is a pussy AND a dick in this. He could screw himself!
Zeiss: "Dragon fighters need ARMOR!!! And TETANUS SHOTS!!!
Delcat: Al Hartley loves him some God-fearin' punctuation marks. Three hyphens, even! Not two! Three! I sense some kind of OCD manifesting here.
Zeiss: How many interjections does one need?
Delcat: I have no idea what's going on in the third panel, except that there is jizz traversing half of it and no one is happy about that state of events.
Zeiss: A rapidly flaccifying dong of disapproval?
Delcat: It must be a flying invisidick, then. I thought those went extinct in the age of the Mayans, though.
Zeiss: I see that "Parables" means "Fuck it, just put whatever" in this instance.
Delcat: Maybe it's a parable about a shaggy dog.
Zeiss: It's early, but I'm calling drugs on this one. What kind of Bible were they using, the Rick James Version?
Delcat: Whatever it is, I hope it had puncuation marks in the concordance to cross-reference your ---s and !!!s with your ???s and ...s.



Zeiss: Yeah, they're on the goofballs.
Delcat: What, you've never seen a sober man so eager at the thought of fictional cuisine that he ripped off and devoured his best friend's face?
Zeiss: "Let's pray I don't shut my head in the waffle machine again!"
Delcat: I won't say this is as far into left field as you can get because there's a long stretch left to go in that direction, but really, how ham-fisted can you get? Dragons don't even consistently represent evil in the Bible.
Zeiss: "Dragons represent evil! And we're always in danger of eating evil! Through our mouths, that is!"
Delcat: Oh, please, Zeiss. Gluttony is the one deadly sin that fundies love and cherish.
Delcat: First panel: Hot pink termite mounds, made only by the fruitiest of termites, are the REAL evil facing America today
Zeiss: This is the strangest allegory I've ever seen, it's like they're just throwing born-again magnetic poetry at a fridge and then working from there.
Zeiss: Ever wonder why they serve a "queen?"
Delcat: Don't worry, it gets stranger.
Delcat: Last panel: oh God Archie's elbow what
Zeiss: Archie's response to sin? Turn into Little Orphan Annie.
Zeiss: His pupils will be next.



Zeiss: FOOOSH
Delcat: Look, I don't know what's so hard to understand, here. It's just an evil dragon that represents bullies which you must carve into steaks before you can have sex with women. That's just root values, there.
Zeiss: He's going for the triple vowel!
Delcat: Yep, definitely OCD. Poor dear.
Zeiss: Only with the meat will the gravy of virtue become palatable. And man do I want to cut the FOOOSH panel out and use it as a stamp.
Delcat: First panel: Archie I'm sorry dude but your pubes are seriously out of control, do something about it
Delcat: just look at how much you're terrifying people
Zeiss: "Oh hey, a letter! I'm just gonna *Archie jizzing out of his pelvis wearing the Parthenon on his head*...fuck it."
Delcat: Also, "deep-down" is a hell of unfortunate modifier when you are talking in the context of anyone's ass and fire.
Zeiss: That ain't fire, just Ben-Gay.



Zeiss: "Screw you guys, I'm gonna burninate the Chick tract over in the next county."
Zeiss: Panel 2: wait what the fuck was i wearing
Delcat: Notice how the word "evil" in the last panel is kind of in a strange font? That's because the copy-editor had to use an X-acto knife to lever "negroes" out and put that in.
Delcat: CONFORM, CHILDREN OF AMERICA, ARYAN BETTY COMMANDS IT
Zeiss: "Us dragon-fighters have other compensations!" Like PCP, if the last panel is anything to go by.
Delcat: Man, I never understood the Betty-Archie-Veronica thing, you know what I mean?
Zeiss: Yeah, you'd think that one of them would justALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOBETTY
Delcat: One of them? I was referring to the fact that Archie is a weed and Betty and Veronica should just go lez out somewhere, I don't know where you're HYPNOBETTY WINS, SHE IS THE BEST
Delcat: jizz-colored clouds all OVER the place



Zeiss: "Haw! Haw!"
Zeiss: Fuck, it IS Chick.
Delcat: Oh man, considering the joke is usually "milk", and what that stands for, I don't WANT to know what "a chocolate thick shake" means.
Delcat: Alcohol goes "gloop". Zeiss, why does alcohol go "gloop"?
Zeiss: Psst, it's actually gun oil.
Zeiss: Roofie technology was not yet perfected in the days of the West.
Delcat: That's not a MAN'S drink, that's a MAN'S lube. Or else I'm still thinking in Trigun fic terms here because of the whole atmosphere.
Delcat: Hey, is he drinking Fourecks? Is this an ad?
Delcat: God, the art just..nothing is in any relation to anything else, even when that something is attached to someone's body.
Zeiss: Thankfully, the standoff was interrupted by a flying Smurf omelette.
Delcat: "A chocolate thick shake!!! Or I will smack you like a bitch!!!"
Delcat: Boy, there sure are a lot of phallic objects hanging limply from people's lips in this comic.
Zeiss:
Delcat: Don't worry, we'll get some snake oil on it and it'll perk right up.



Zeiss: Whoa whoa whoa, the hell is Cowboy Henk doing here?
Delcat: Remember, racism is okay if it's racism toward Native Americans! They have casinos and junk, they can't complain!
Zeiss: *Dusts off Patchy detector just in case*
Delcat: "Oh, YEAH??? What's that???"
"The stump where my forearm used to be!!!"
"oh dude I'm sorry man I didn't even realize"
Delcat: "...ever since they started to bus students across the prairie". And by "students", they mean "inner city kids". And by "inner city kids", they mean "black people". ~*UNFORTUNATE IMPLICATIONS*~
Delcat: Archie wears lambskin chaps because he has a latex allergy.
Zeiss: And he wears vests made of corn just for the feeling



Zeiss: They're starting to develop complex social structures? Learn sign language? Groom each other for nits? I don't get it.
Zeiss: And evolution is totally true, don't try to tell me those pants don't share a common ancestor with llamas.
Delcat: Because, you know, school in that era was like Little House on the Prairie all the time. Which is to say horribly unscientific, waived during harvest time, and sparkling white
Delcat: Archie has an idea! A wonderful, awful, eyebrow-thickening idea! But did he get it from Betty, or from Filthy Books Co.?
Zeiss: *Waits for the tumbleweed equivalent of Blackground Dude to blow by*
Delcat: Archie prepares to borrow a loan so that he may set out on the Oregon Trail!
Delcat: * You attempt to ford the overwrought metaphor. You lose 2 oxen and 98 sanity.
*JUGHEAD has died of dysentery.
Zeiss: Wait, we haven't got to overwrought metaphor yet. Place your bets, everyone!
Delcat: Um, let's see. EYEBROWS are to FILTHY BOOKS as PATCHY is to YAAAAAAAAH.
Delcat: And yours?
Zeiss: I'm betting on the "Jesus is the flamboyantly-fluffy-chaps of our souls!" approach.



Delcat: Nice try, but seeing as this is inexplicably the last page of the parable, I think the moral here is "Bibles are for eating and buy more Archie comics at your local Christian bookstore today!".
Delcat: also HAIL HYPNOBETTY
Zeiss: And we all know how well this strategy works in real life, too!
Delcat: Jughead has wisely closed his eyes against her wiles, Brock-style.
Delcat: "I ate a book once. It took me many months of eating and chewing. Do you want me to eat your Bibles? I will eat your Bibles."
Zeiss: "Try this one!"
"Hey, I can read it, you don't have to be so-"
"Get it? Jesus is bread!"
"OH GOD MY EYEBALLS"
"Jesus is bread!"
Delcat: It's a shame they're throwing out the science books, or else they might have learned about this "tapeworm" thing that Jughead has had for eight months. He's so hungry, folks...so very hungry.
Zeiss: They're all excited now, just wait until they find out it's nothing but Nicholas Sparks floor to ceiling.



Delcat: AUGH A TRIANGULAR POTATO oh wait it's the janitor's head
Zeiss: They didn't take out the evolution books fast enough to prevent the interspecies monkey-breeding spree, I see.
Delcat: It's like he's wearing NOTHING AT ALL
Delcat: Dude, why do they even bother having a science fair in schools that have canonical geniuses? Why don't they just give the kid a grant and...I don't know, let him graduate already, it's only been seventy years or something.
Zeiss: Blatant awesomeface in Panel 3, look at that.
Zeiss: "Now that I've blasted all the fundies into space, I'll win that Nobel for sure!"
Zeiss: "HEY ARCHIE, HAVE FUN PROSELYTIZING THE OORT CLOUD"
Delcat: Oh man, the Oort Cloud is funny no matter what.
Delcat: Zeiss, you're the space nut here. Explain to me exactly how those arbitrarily-placed fins are supposed to function.
Zeiss: You see, uh...
Zeiss: ...
Zeiss: ...FINS ARE LIKE SINS
Zeiss: AND THEY'LL STEER YOU OUT OF THE STRAIGHT 'N' NARROW OR SUMMAT
Delcat: That's the real reason they had to shut down the Space Shuttle program. No racing stripes.



Delcat: Aaaaand we graduate from PCP to mushrooms.
Zeiss: When I think "aliens", I think "the Irish!"
Delcat: You know, one of the twin planets always hangs a little lower than the others. Remember that when drawing yaoi.
Delcat: If they're so totally opposite in personality, why do they dress exactly the same? Do the evil twins do it out of pure spite?
Delcat: Way to climb the hell outta that spacecraft despite there being absolutely no atmosphere, gg team
Delcat: Wait an ever-pickin' cotton-lovin' second. In every other comic that Hartley's done, hippies are Godless degenerates. So what the hell are THESE flower-humping pot-smoking bastards doing as the GOOD twins?
Zeiss: Maybe their Muppetness offsets their hippiness.
Delcat: Dude. Did you just try to tell me that the Muppets OFFSET hippiness? Are we talking about the same Jim Henson, here?
Zeiss: We're in the Archie Zone, Del. Things are just different 'round here.
Delcat: I...I don't want to live in this world D:



Delcat: "And WE live on THAT planet!!! And I'm PISSED OFF because someone built a tiny OFF-RAMP on my HEAD for ANTS!!!"
Zeiss: Second panel: That one on the right isn't grumpy, he's cowering in abject terror.
Delcat: Yeah, looking at it, two of them are like that. Is that an OSHIT A METEOR face?
Delcat: I'm sorry, I was too busy being distracted by the ABJECT HORROR OF THE BLUE LADY'S EXISTENCE
Delcat: I mean good God, she looks like something I made in Spore and then scrapped because it was too creepy
Delcat: only BLONDE
Zeiss: So how many can you identify? I see some Ronald McDonalds, Smurfs, Plum Dudes from Candyland, and Oscarluffagusses.
Delcat: I just see the horrible expanse of blue gum and blackness, man.
Delcat: Also a very telling giant mushroom.
Delcat: And--OH MY GOD, CAN IT BE? A SINGLE EXCLAMATION POINT!
Delcat: THEY REALLY ARE SICK AND TWISTED
Zeiss: You know that one theory where apes evolved into homo sapiens through the help of hallucinogens? I think that's the case here, they're just spouting out the God stuff because really, they don't have the heart to tell Archie.
Delcat: I think it's just an extended parable about nature v. nurture in modern psychology.
Zeiss: Oh, and that one pink guy from the Powerpuff Girls and a pack of Otter Pops.
Delcat: oh dawg I could so go for some Otter Pops



Zeiss: Wait, maybe -these- are the hippies.
Zeiss: “Why do all of you get the pizza, while I get the crust?!”
Delcat: Remember, good neighborhoods look good because the people in it worship God, not because they're of a higher socioeconomic class and have more time and money to put into appearances. Furthermore, if you're in a bad neighborhood, it's not only entirely your fault, but you're also a bad person and a criminal by default. And also probably not white. ~*UNFORTUNATE IMPLICATIONS*~
Delcat: Also that is not a weed, it is a tire, you are very confused sir
Delcat: why the hell do you even need things with tires, the planet is like a square mile total
Zeiss: also OH FUCK MY HANDS ARE GRAPE-FLAVORED
Delcat: RUN YOU BASTARD
Delcat: RUN BEFORE THEY LICK YOU
Delcat: Seriously, if this entire thing doesn't reek of class-based racism, I don't know what does. Once you realize that Hartley's father was a staunch anti-unionist, though, the puzzle pieces start falling into place.
Delcat: that is to say the work-related kind, not the SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN kind
Delcat: although really...
Zeiss: Oh, and re: the whole unfortunate implications thing? It wouldn't be the last time.
Delcat: Yeah, but I don't think that's Hartley. You can tell because the drawing is competent and NO ONE IS SHOUTING EVERY OTHER TEXT BALLOON
Zeiss: Oh, they shout all right, but they at least ration out their exclamation points better, I'll give you that.
Delcat: So basically, the entire Pep crew has problems. Considering what they ended up doing with the Sonic comic, I'm unsurprised.
Zeiss: GO OUT, ARCHIE, AND !!! TO THE EXTREME
Delcat: also featured: a small yellow man with buck teeth and slanted eyes
Delcat: BUT MOVING RIGHT ALONG



Zeiss: So they've wandered into Meet the Feebles, then.
Zeiss: And dude, they already had a Happy Christian Wonderland on that one planet, what the hell do you need to go back to Earth for?
Delcat: No milkshakes.
Zeiss: Thank you, and be sure to check your planets regularly for any unusual lumps, abrasions, or swelling
Delcat: So we have two smokers (that's always a trip in kids' comics, I must say), a drunk, a streaker, and...a very angry large-toothed guy with pink hair. What exactly is his vice?
Zeiss: Being Jack Nicholson.
Delcat: Thaaaat'd do it.
Delcat: This comes back to the delusion fundies have that morals are strictly Christian, and without God, people just lapse into mindless raping and murdering regardless of what it does to the societal norm.
Delcat: And with complete equality, of course, they wouldn't need to steal, because everyone would have an equal share in resources.
Delcat: Wait a second...OH MY GOD ALIENS ARE COMMUNISTS
Zeiss: tl;dr - FUCKING HIPPIES
Delcat: "Arch, there's got to be a LESSON for us in this trip!!!"
" 'Don't take the brown acid'???"
"EXACTLY!!!"
Zeiss: Guys, you're in space, you don't have to cover it up anymore. You can make out, it's safe.


NEXT TIME: SHIT GETS EVEN CRAZIER


Special thanks to the folks at Carp's Place, for providing the .pdf files from which these images were converted.