"Sirk"'s Storeyville has been published into a rather ritzy and lavish
hard-bound package -- priced to match at ten or twelve times its
original news-print self-published edition of a dozen years back -- a comic
which, reportedly, threw the creators into a temporal bit of financial
ruin. The thing kind of just doesn't look right -- the tactile
experience is off. It turns into a different item now that it has resurfaced
in this thing designed for your book-shelf, to placed next to other
comeek grapheeks of self-import.

I do regard Storeyville as a classic, and will shrug the half-joking
half-serious "It belongs in the Comix Canon!" In that regard, it's
salvaging from the dust-bins into a more permaneable product is a good
thing. Even if we now have a sort of imitation of the original, which made
use and played off of its shoody newsprint materials.

The "Sirk"s also published two comic-zines, apparently the by-product
of needing to find a place to stick a few essays they planned to send
off to Jeff Levine for "Destroy All Comics" -- before that went kaput.
.......................

My monthly breeze through the latest issues of the double digests for
Betty and Veronica and Jughead -- largely mining for which does a better
representation of Dan Decarlo and Samm Schwartz respectively, but not
entirely -- lands on "Jughead" this month. Decidedly lands on
"Jughead". (Last month it landed on B and V, Jughead looked like a dinky
collection indeed!) As in, it looks like I should buy the thing. What I
noticed was Samm Schwartz was there en masse -- back to back to back to
back to back. It looked to me that this had to be an editorial
decision. Not representative -- just a dash of a few issues from the 1970s
and 1980s... a shame, not so much because they are better or worse than
the hey-day of the 1960s -- particularly with this cartoonist who seemed
to develop some interesting tricks later in his career, but in an odd
situation like this representation would be nice. (What I have
gathered is that the company reprints things in blocks. I've always wondered
what their process was for these digests.) My suspicion was basically
confirmed when, toward the back, I saw that they had reprinted a story
published in 1998 -- a memorial from the time Schwartz died where
Jughead searches around time because he learns that his old friend, Samm,
has stopped in town. I was half a dozen years away from having bought an
Archie comic at the time, but I bought that one because I saw this
little tribute.

The date tells the story. Ten years ago. So we have here a ten year
memorial rather low key tribute issue to the memory Samm Schwartz. Even
in terms of low key items, they could have done more -- a few more
stories, a bit from an earlier decade, but I have to wonder...

... does this mean in a few years they'll see fit to do the same for
Dan Decarlo? ...

The answer may lie in the fact that they can keep in the name "Samm" in
these reprints, but "Dan Decarlo" must be ripped out.

I'm sad to report, incidentally, that Tom Hart's study of Samm
Schwartz's ability to draw a tie, through a posting of a teen comic he did for
Tower Comics in the last half of the 1960s, is no longer available
online. So, you have nothing to imitate in figuring out how you should
draw a tie.

I have thought that maybe I should record the quick analyses of my
monthly test as a way of running through the sometimes understood and
sometimes painfully well understood by-ways of this corner of comic-dom,
Archie Comics. I once left what was sort of my final thought on Archie
Comics at the Comics Journal message board, oddly enough a response to a
comment made by one Evan Dorkin. I should have saved it, but for obvious
reasons I am not in the habit of saving comments made on Comics Journal
message boards. I do recall my first sentence, "It is both easy and
impossible to defend Archie Comics." Samm Schwartz is easily defended, for instance.