| Except for issue number two, the centerpiece of all the old Jozines was the detailed unofficial history of Dan DeCarlo & Josie and, outside of the fan art, it was the most read and talked about and reasons for this is understandable as Archie Comics never dwells at all about its own history in detail like DC and Marvel. Sure, there’s the urban legend of John Goldwater’s egotistical notoriety and the many opinion pieces about the company and it’s product from publications like Comic Journal and Comic Buyers Guide, but never anything concrete, thus this ‘mystery’ continues. This might be explained by the fact that the comics Archie produces have no serious depth and substance and its characters and plotlines are recycled per half a generation. This process is not foreign to superhero comics, but Archies heavily relies on a much younger audience with a much shorter more temporary attention span, once their audience grows up so does their tastes and they graduate to the superheroes titles and/or video games, so there’s not much of Archies to hold on to when that phase is all done, thus no need to dig through comics that is more or less temporary as their audience. With all of this in mind, my sense of preserving this “temp” history might have peeked when Archie was reacting negatively towards DeCarlo with a dash of revisionism history during that messy ball of wax that was the 2000 Josie movie. Still, underling ALL of this is my curiosity about a big unusual piece of pop culture like this that is still inside my overgrown head and freakin’ why and as there wasn’t much to look into in the first place, my curiosity took the aggressive and I had to stick my head out and find the answers….unofficially, that is. Enjoy, Don-O |
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