Back in the 1970s, Spire Publishing--producers of lurid evangelical Christian books like The Cross and the Switchblade--decided to publish comic books that attempted to incaulcate evangelical values through the devil's medium for corrupting children. These comics, drawn by artist Al Hartley, included comic book adaptations of Biblical stories and biographies including an adaptation of Charles Colson's autobiography Born Again. You can see a listing of Spire's output (including some available on PDF) here.
Somwhere along the line Spire managed to somehow get the rights to the Archie Comics characters. Hartley had worked for Archie and the publisher thought, in the words of writer Buzz Dixon, "the stories were going to be run of the mill Archie stories with a little patina of Christian morality ("Gee, Betty, it's not good to cheat on tests!")" How wrong they were.
Hartley drew the Riverdale gang in preachy morality tales of the decline of values and how believing in Jesus can change all that. Especially of interest is Archie's Parables (1975 - available on the above site in PDF form) which includes the lovely bit of dialogue from the usually heavenly (for other reasons) Betty Cooper: "Oh Sheriff when they took the Bible out of school more and more problems came in...now we have books that say we all came from monkeys!" Archie's Date Book (1978 - also a PDF) comes close--at first-- to duplicating the feel of a real Archie comic, but in the end it asserts its candy coated morality about dating ("When we go steady with Jesus he lifts us up"). Archie's owners, who were Jewish, apparently were not amused.
Back in the 1970s you couldn't go to a church Christmas party as a kid--no matter how liberal your denomination might be-- without getting dumped some Spire comics on you. (I kept Spire's revisioning of the story of St. Paul, which is actually pretty good.) In the current climate, I'm amazed they haven't made a comeback.
Posted by Graeme Burk at November 11, 2004 08:56 PMMy family's church escaped those, thanks be to whatever. Or maybe we just didn't have good enough Christmas parties. Those comics sound deeply dreadful. But then "Archie" never was quite reality-based.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam at November 11, 2004 10:50 PMI loved those comics. I am looking to buy some of those right now. I can understand why some people wouldnt want kids to read them...I mean Christianity is a terrible thing. What good has ever come from being Christian anyway? I think Pagans, Wiccans, and Scientologists have done MUCH more good for the world than all the Christians put together (BTW they are mostly white anyway, and you know whats up with those people).
Posted by: Joe at January 20, 2005 05:04 AM