"Useless Archie Characters"

Rolling down this list:

#10: Jellybean. Jughead's sister. She was basically after my time. I was buying that comic book out of habit as it switched from the oft-surreal Daryl Edelman experimentation to the tedium that mars Al Hartley. (Al Hartley, of course, the Christian Spire line artist, and his evangelism tended to crop into his mainline work, as well the author and artist of such things as that late 1970s anti-feminism anti-ERA story seen in the coffee-table book of 1991.) I was going to chug on to that magical birth of his sister, but I stopped, asked "Why?", and bolted. God, I hate Al Hartley!!! (Actually, to be honest, I also hate George Glaidir, which means I automatically hate a third of anything released from this company.)

#9: "Superteens". Has a curious history. I'm not going to say it's a history that beggars well for the company. But, throwing themselves at the campy Batman show in 1966, they made their characters into wacky superheroes foiling wacky plots from wacky super-villians. Frank Doyle probably saved it slightly from the tedium. And then they apparently reintroduced this concept in the late 1990s? Why? Pointless, I know.

#7: Charyl Blossom. Now this one is both before and after my time. (Of course, "my time" at this point is probably best characterized as roughly 1958 into the 1960s, but never mind.) Apparently in 1982 the company decided to introduce their version of a teenage slut? Is that the deal? If you go to a link in the comments section, you will see that someone scanned the first appearance, infamous as it is because the premise is that Cheryl Blossom tried to go topless on the beach and her brother drunk beer. It's a morality story (this is code-enforced kids comics, after all) -- the cops get them at the end. I'm struck by something here -- if you must wander over there, the "shocking situation"'s been done.

Actually, I've seen a couple covers of this comic that need some comment.

#8: Never heard of the Hispanic Vice Principal. I will say that there was a good military vice principal character who appeared in a few stories in the 1980s. Introduced in a 21 page story where Weatherbee quits because he thinks he's become a pushover, the drill seargant is hired, the characters thus rally to rehire Weatherbee, and then Weatherbee has the last laugh and hires the drill seargant as vice principal. Predictable enough, and charming enough.

#6: Bingo Wilken. I don't know. Actually he's not the most jarringly obscene in-house Archie rip-off in the company's history -- that distinction falls to some "Wilbur" or other. In the Wilkens' defense, the specific relationship dynamics at play with the feuding families and the teenage lovers can't be played in the regular Riverdale. Thus, I have nothing against this gambit.

...
Eye Da? Really? A character with 3 eyes? Next thing you know, they'll introduce a character who can sniff out the amount of hidden money.