Jughead (2015-Present)

I’m now officially caught up on Chip Zdarsky’s new comic series Jughead, and honestly, I really enjoy it.  I wouldn’t have thought I needed any more reasons to be excited about Jughead being canonically ace, but I found another one – if this hadn’t happened, I can almost guarantee that I would’ve never started reading (or possibly ever even heard of) this exceptionally fun series.

At first glance, Jughead seems like a dangerous character to put in the central role, at least from a fandom standpoint.  His origins in the Archie comics place him squarely as the best friend, the funny sidekick.  Now, characters like this tend to be enormously popular, and for good reason, but there’s also a good reason for keeping them in a supporting position.  Countless sitcoms have run into trouble when they discover – and subsequently overuse – their breakout character.  Push that sort of character to the forefront, and you might wind up with an Erkel.  Sure, Jughead is great when he’s Archie’s sarcastic slacker buddy with a hole in his life that only hamburgers can fill, but if you give him his own comic, do you run the risk of ruining him?

In this case, those concerns are happily unfounded.  Jughead rocks his own comic – honestly, I’m a little surprised at just how well it comes together.  You wouldn’t necessarily think a lazy kid whose chief preoccupation is his appetite would make an engaging protagonist, but Zdarsky’s initial series arc has found a way to incorporate a lot of action while still maintaining Jughead’s core character.  The first issue introduces Mr. Stanger, the new Riverdale principal with rigorous expectations and totally suspect motives, and he becomes an immediate enemy to Jughead by replacing the normal cafeteria food with high-nutrition slop.  Food being Jughead’s first love, this gives him a reason to get off his butt and do something, and also puts him in Stanger’s crosshairs.  From there, we see the escalations of Stanger threatening Jughead’s loafing way of life, Jughead pushing back/becoming a bigger target, and even better, Jughead beginning to realize just how bad news this guy is.  Suddenly, you have the funny, hungry slacker very unexpectedly finding himself in the center of a crusade, with very few allies because, as the funny, hungry slacker, no one takes him seriously.  Plenty of fertile ground for storytelling.

Also, it’s super fun.  The plots are crazy-in-a-good-way, the jokes range from fantastic to just-on-the-right-side-of-corny, and tons of natural humor shines though in the characterizations.  I just love the opening scene of issue #3, in which a dejected Jughead, deprived of his video games, works an imaginary controller while mumbling to himself about the bosses he’s killing, and I get a kick out of Archie’s periodic meta queries on why people aren’t more interested in what he’s up to.  The comic also works in some extra entertainment through regular dream sequences.  Each is set up like a separate mini-comic with the larger issue, with its own title and sensibility.  In his head, Jughead has been a time traveler, a secret agent, a pirate, and a superhero, and he’s also given us a fantastic Westeros parody in Game of Jones (ha!)

On the aro-aceness front, the early issues include little references before the Holy-Crap-They-Just-Used-the-Actual-Word-“Asexual”-in-Casual-Conversation-How-Cool-is-That scene in issue #4.  Jughead comments on his disinterest in dating now and then (again, casually – not making a big thing of it,) and he once bails on a fantasy sequence when a pretty girl in it moves to kiss him.  I like that, while he’s (thankfully!) not Asexual Jughead the Asexual Character, it is still a distinct part of his character that won’t get the mentioned-once and-never-seen-again treatment.