Archie out of Context shows off the mature side of Archie characters

Archie Comics has been rather safe comic-book humor for almost 80 years now. It gets a lot edgier when certain panels are taken completely out of context, leaving the reader to form a risque assumption

Ashleigh Rajala, a 33-year-old filmmaker from Vancouver, started the Archie out of Context Tumblr to highlight some of the funnier scenarios. Rajala started collecting different comics, using editions from each decade Archie ran, and began posting them online.

“About five or six years ago, I shared a house in Vancouver with five other roommates,” Rajala said in an interview with Polygon. “One of them, when she was unpacking, found a couple of Archie comics from her childhood in a random box. For the next couple months, we slowly acquired Archie comics from various sources, including my thirteen-year-old cousin, who gave me all her ‘doubles.’

“One fateful day, we found a single page that had fallen loose and was thus out of context. It was on our fridge for a while, where it became enough of a conversation piece that we thought it should enshrined on Tumblr.”

Most of the out of context scenarios featuring Archie and his gang — including Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie, Moose, Midge and more — tend to come off as sexual. When Archie Comics initially launched in 1941, the goal of the company was to make a comic that appealed to young children as well as teenagers. As a result, neither the writing nor the illustrations could be overly explicit with the details of Archie’s love life. Instead, as the years went on, Archie writers had to get clever with their insinuations, all while keeping it PG.

“With the mature jokes that are totally intentional, it’s hard to say why they would be intentional,” Rajala admitted. “I think it’s a combination of classic tongue-in-cheek humor that typically goes over kids’ heads and the comics being a product of their time. A lot of the humour is sexist and homophobic and sadly typical of its era. I think maybe they just kept reprinting them hoping kids wouldn’t notice.”

Some of the panels Rajala is referring to can be seen below.

Tumblr/ArchieOutofContext

Tumblr/Archie out of Context

Tumblr/Archie out of Context

Tumblr/Archie out of Context

Rajala believes that the reason the out of context jokes remain as funny as they do is because readers are used to the staple version of Archie that was introduced more than half a century ago. Archie Andrews is the definition of a wholesome teenager — as are his friends — so the idea that they can be as lewd or provocative as a normal person seems strange.

“It was both aspirational and relatable,” Rajala said. “I think that still holds, to some degree, but I think, by now, it’s such a staple because it always has been. There’s not just a layer of nostalgia, but also of community. Everyone knows Archie comics.”

That also explains why these jokes come across funnier than out of context panels from other series. There are dozens of Tumblrs and fan pages dedicated to taking panels from Marvel and DC comics and pointing out how ridiculous they seem as stand-alone images, but because Marvel and DC have grown over the decades to incorporate more mature storylines, it never sees as ostentatious.

Archie, however, is one of the last innocent comic book characters who hasn’t changed too much from his original conception in 1941. The storylines have progressed to incorporate modern settings, technology and trends, but the wholesomeness of Archie and the gang never strayed too far away from creators Bob Montana and John L. Goldwater’s original conception. Archie out of Context plays upon that reluctance to change, and uses the never-changing attitudes of Riverdale’s upstanding citizens to get the joke across.

“I’m not sure what is so satisfying about this subversion,” Rajala said. “Perhaps there’s some kind of reclamation going on, where we take what we were given as children and remake it for ourselves as adults. Things you loved as a child feel like a part of you, and so you want to assimilate them into your adult world.

“But I could totally be reading way too much into it. Maybe it’s a lot more basic than that. The lack of context begs you to read something dirty into them. It’s the classic ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink.’”

Just because Archie’s core character hasn’t changed too much, though, doesn’t mean writers haven’t had fun with placing the character in unusual settings. From dealing with Universal’s lineup of monsters like Dracula and the Mummy, to meeting President Obama, Archie’s setting has changed consistently throughout the years.

On Thursday, the newest iteration of Archie in pop culture will arrive. Riverdale, a new series on the CW that puts Archie and his friends in a more adult, Twin Peaks world, marks one of the first times that Riverdale will see a mature setting. Rajala, a long time reader and avid fan of classic Archie, thinks the setting is more funny than it is daring, and likens the concept to the rise of gritty dramas that have overtaken TV in the past decade or so.

Several years ago, I remember seeing this video going around during peak ‘gritty reboot’ mockery,” Rajala said. “And now they’ve gone and made it. We truly live in a post-modern world.”

Riverdale will premiere on Jan. 26 at 9 p.m. ET on the CW.