{"id":2496,"date":"2007-08-13T23:14:46","date_gmt":"2007-08-14T06:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/08\/13\/stay-out-of-riverdale\/"},"modified":"2007-08-13T23:14:46","modified_gmt":"2007-08-14T06:14:46","slug":"stay-out-of-riverdale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/08\/13\/stay-out-of-riverdale\/","title":{"rendered":"“Stay out of Riverdale!”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sitting on the stands at your local Safeway and Borders bookstores right now (probably less so any comic book store) is a copy of an Archie Digest, of interest because it is a reprint of Archie #1 from 1942, as well the first Archie story from one year prior.\u00c2\u00a0 (Oddly, the Joe Edwards funny animal stories were more amusing than Bob Montana’s Archie comics.\u00c2\u00a0 An alternative route for the company, the path not taken, I suppose.)
\nNow, we all know Archie as roughly the most white-bread creation there is.\u00c2\u00a0 They inserted a couple of black teenagers into Riverdale in the 1970s, which if one complains is a little token-ish, i would suggest that they would have been in a place rhetorically if they had not.\u00c2\u00a0 One comment on the evolution of Chuck Clayton, though: the company appears to have evolved his main character trait from being a superstar basketball player to a prodigious Artist.\u00c2\u00a0 I imagine a board meeting at some point pondering the issues of Racial stereotypes for their token black character.<\/p>\n

Back to 1942, and you have this:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(Image lifted from here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I do not know quite what to say about the image, not the most egregious example from this comic book.\u00c2\u00a0 Though, as somebody pointed out in the “Comics Journal” message board, he did get the best line in.\u00c2\u00a0 But I’d think the editorial staff would be obligated to mention something about this.\u00c2\u00a0 Save some of that space of company promotional material published at the top of this digest to make a somewhat bland historical point, on par with what I have seen in reprints of Basil Wolverton’s Space-hawk (when he was diverted from his science fiction soap opera to direct attention to the War effort) of Japanese caricatures, and I have seen for Carl Barks Donald Duck reprints toward American Indians (except the example I can think of off the top of my mind Disney actually awkwardly altered, “cleaning up” the racism.)\u00c2\u00a0 [I don’t think the Tintin reprints have as much obligation to mention the problem.]
\nI know what I am seeing, but there are kids reading this, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sitting on the stands at your local Safeway and Borders bookstores right now (probably less so any comic book store) is a copy of an Archie Digest, of interest because it is a reprint of Archie #1 from 1942, as well the first Archie story from one year prior.\u00c2\u00a0 (Oddly, the Joe Edwards funny animal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}