I was doing some blog-surfing the other day when I came across something that made me question the very nature of reality, something that made me doubt my own sanity and made me wonder if everything I’ve been doing my whole life was leading to this great revelation:

Archie denounces the sin of respecting other cultures.

Say WHAT?!

Apparently Archie Andrews is some sort of ultra-conservative right-wing Christian fundamentalist! Good Lord, did someone open the Ark of the Covenant or something?

Needless to say, this offended the hell out of me. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes everyone think that we Christians are a bunch of self-righteous buttholes. Now some of you jaded, world-weary comic book readers might be thinking, “Archie is the type of thing Ned Flanders would read anyway, so what’s the big surprise?” I’m glad to say that even mainstream comics publishers have standards, so this type of touchy material would never have made it to print. So where did this abomination unto the Lord come from? Actually, there’s quite a bit of history going on behind this mess, so don’t rally your lynch mob to Archie Publications just yet.

So I did y’all a favor and did some research on the topic, and it turns out that there was a whole bunch of similarly themed Archie titles published under a company called Spire Christian Comics. Artist Al Hartley, son of former U.S. Congressman Fred A. Hartley, was working under Archie Publications at the time and somehow convinced them to give Spire permission to use Archie for their proselytizing needs. What better way to sway the hearts of young, innocent minds than with good, clean Archie fun? Comic book denouncer Fredric Wertham would turn in his grave if he just saw the irony going on in here. Seduction of the Innocent, indeed.

I’m gonna save the rest of the stuff I want to say about this weird-ass comic for next time, but if you want more info, you’ll want to check out this blog entry by DaveX of startlingmoniker, where I got the images and most of the info from. (FYI, I changed the image sizes on my blog for upload purposes.) Comments, anyone?

Stay tuned for Part 2!