As I’ve mentioned before, Mark Waid decided to kick things off his time on Jughead with a Big Ace Girl Problem, much
like Ryan North did with his first Jughead
story. Things were just getting
started at the end of the arc’s first issue, so there wasn’t much to say then,
but now that the second part is out, I wanted to take a look at what we’ve got
(some spoilers for issues #15 and 16.)
Once
again, Sabrina is central to the proceedings, but this time around, her
involvement in the aforementioned girl problem is strictly magical, not
personal. When Jughead suffers an
unfortunate mishap with a punch card and finds himself unable to score the
Josie and the Pussycats concert tickets he wanted (just go with it,) Sabrina’s
efforts to help him out go awry. Through
a combination of magic hijinks/getting a little overambitious with what she’s
setting out to do, the spell gets turbo charged and winds up making every
non-Sabrina girl in Riverdale (including the Pussycats) fall madly in love with
him.
So,
bog-standard love-spell-goes-haywire plot (even though, in this case, the whole
“love spell” thing was a mistake to start with – love was never actually part
of Sabrina’s plan,) with the added wrinkle of a central character who doesn’t
want any girl drooling over him, let
alone all of Riverdale. Overall, I’d say
the story is kind of a mixed bag, although I’d put it way ahead of North’s
Sabrina arc.
We’ll
start with the negatives. As with the other Sabrina story, a big part of the problem here is that it sets up a
disconcerting personal issue for Jughead but then spends most of the time
dealing with the magical aspects of it than Jughead’s reaction to what’s going
on. Jughead’s instant horror at seeing
an army of gaga-eyed girls (and his awesome accompanying zombie fantasy) shows
that Waid gets why this is a bad thing for Jughead, but very little time is
actually spent on it. It again becomes a
story that’s less about Jughead and more about Sabrina, how she manages to undo
the spell without Jughead or any of the rest of the gang seeing what she’s up
to. If writers keep coming up with these
stories for Jughead, can we at least make sure they’re definitely about him?
Another problem, non-ace-related, is the return of passive Jughead in
the first part of the story. I know what
this kid is capable of when he puts his mind to it, so it annoys me to see him
throw up his hands in despair and not try to fix things.
Fortunately,
he’s a little more proactive in the second half – even better, his friends are
instantly all about helping him. Upon
seeing the army of girls, Archie and Reggie join Sabrina in trying to help
Jughead and reverse whatever’s happened.
Again, the story winds up focusing a lot more on the magic so neither
guy comes out and says this, but it’s at least implied that both of them know
Jughead doesn’t want this and they have his back. After the gross, gross crap they pulled in
the first Sabrina arc, it doesn’t exactly smooth things over for me, but I’ll
take it.
While it
looks like there might be one more part for this story, it also looks like the
ace-related part is over. At least, the
spell, or that aspect of it, is over (issue 16 ends with a different magical
conundrum fro Jughead.) It remains to be
seen whether Jughead or any of his friends – including Betty and/or Veronica,
who had magically-induced crushes on him for a hot second – will have anything
more to say about it, or if we’ll just be moving on to the next problem.
More
generally, Waid’s take on the characters feels pretty right all-around (which,
given his experience writing Archie,
makes sense.) His humor is also
excellently on-point. I especially love
Jughead’s zombie fantasy – not only is it a hilarious representation of how he
reacts to a gaggle of lovestruck girls, but Waid also sticks in jokes about
Zdarsky, North, Afterlife with Archie,
Achie Digest, and zombie tropes, all
in the space of a few pages. I’m still a
little wary of him on the asexual front, but I feel confident that Waid can
handle all the other aspects of the comic.
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