Tuesday, March 30, 2021

It literally may have never occurred to me to search for it by name before.

Also, I'm not sure I'd rest my burgers on anyone's ass, unconscious or otherwise...After a discussion on Twitter about Archie Comics digests and the difficulty in finding a specific one, I searched for about five minutes on eBay and found what I was looking for! I had this Captain Hero digest as a kid--it's from 1981--but have no recollection of buying it. (My dad was a principal and my mom a teacher, so it's entirely possible a kid left it behind--or had it taken away for reading in class!)

This digest was a collection of most of Jughead's short-lived superhero series, Jughead as Captain Hero from 1966-67. It's pretty obviously "inspired" by the Batman TV show, but it's fun. Archie also had a superheroic identity, Pureheart the Powerful, with an amusing explanation on why no one notices his super-powered antics: his power "fogs the mind of ordinary beings." Reggie gets into the act as Evilheart the Great, only doing good deeds incidentally to showing Pureheart up: his unrepentant dickishness seems more amusing to me as an old grouch. Betty appears as Superteen in one story to bail out PH; while Veronica was usually the hostage to get the plot going and sadly doesn't get her own heroic identity.

I'm not sure what happened to my copy; it could well be somewhere. But I'm not sure I ever looked for a replacement, since there are like fourteen million Archie digests, and I thought it would be under "Archie" or "Laugh" or something. There's another old digest story I remember, with Reggie claiming to have the power of mind over matter, as he's able to withstand winter chill in a light sweater; but of course there's a trick and comeuppance to it. Finding that one, though...that's going to be trickier.

2 comments:

  1. Wait, your dad was a principal and your mom a teacher? Jesus, dude, my sympathies. No way you got away with ANYTHING school-related back then huh?

    Oh, and while comical (especially when they're unconscious) even resting a half-eaten burger on someone's unconscious ass (drunk or otherwise) would probably spark another #metoo movement, haha.

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  2. Archie Comics put out a couple trades with those stories. They focus more on the Pureheart stuff but you should be able to find them on one of the online book sites.

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