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Today, see Jughead give the Christmas gift that truly no one wanted, a Christmas themed rap performance by him and Chuck Clayton.
It’s our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day’s Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened and you can see what the “treat” for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries. This year, the theme is a Very Dope 90s Christmas! Each day will be a Christmas comic book story from the 1990s, possibly ones that have a specific 1990s bent to it (depends on whether I can come up with 24 of them).
This year’s Advent Calendar, of Grunge Santa Claus giving out 90s present, like a Tamagotchi, while posing with four superheroes with the most-90s costumes around, is by Nick Perks.
And now, Day 17 will be opened (a bit late) (once opened, the door will feature a panel from the featured story)…
Today, we look at 1990’s “Christmas Rapping” from Riverdale High #4 by John Wilcox, Stan Goldberg and Mike Esposito.
A while back, I did a piece about earnest but terrible raps by TV characters. The funny thing about it is that the whole reason I initially decided to do that piece was after I did a piece about surprising rap performances in movies, I excluded TV movies from that article and I really wanted to include the earnest and awful “Sugar Sugar” rap that Jughead does in the May 1990 TV movie about the Archie gang coming back to Riverdale as adults called To Riverdale and Back Again, but when I actually got around to doing the piece, I forgot to include it! So, well, enjoy the cringe…
The logistics of the bit is fascinating, as it certainly suggests that Jughead and his son frequently practice this routine, right? Also, wasn’t that THEIR boombox? Why did they walk away and leave it there? And why is Jughead using AAVE as he walks away? Goodness me, that’s so, so embarrassing.
So this comic book example is not MORE embarrassing than that (what COULD be?) but it is at least in the same basic vicinity, and knowing that it came out later that same year makes it all the more cringeworthy as it’s, like, but, but, you DID see how bad the first instance of Jughead rapping was, right? Or perhaps they just thought, “Oh, so this means Jughead is a rapper now. We should work this into the comics ASAP. Maybe he can also tell us how wack drugs are.”
There was a long-running Archie comic book series that launched in 1972 called Archie at Riverdale High, that explored the world around Archie Andrews, but with a slightly more serious approach than the standard Archie comic book story. This followed in the footprints of Life With Archie, a comic book that was also based on doing stories outside the traditional scope of Archie comic book stories, but Life With Archie eventually trended towards the absurd, while Archie at Riverdale High was more down to Earth (well, as down to Earth as an Archie comic book series could be. Archie and the gang still went on more adventures in a single school year than James Bond went on in all of his films). Archie at Riverdale High ended in 1987, but in 1990, it was revived as simply Riverdale High, spotlighting stories involving the gang’s actual high school but, well, you know Archie Comics, most themes were extremely tenuous. The bigger hook for Riverdale High was to try to involve real life schools as editor Barry Grossman really tried to do some reader engagement.
Anyhow, in the fourth issue, the gang all gets a mysterious invitation from Jughead and Chuck Clayton (Chuck had debuted in Life With Archie in 1971, right before Archie at Riverdale High was launched and was a prominent figure in Archie at Riverdale High along with his dad, the school’s basketball and wrestling coach) to come to Jughead’s house for a special Christmas party on December 22nd…
So everyone shows up, intrigued as to what this is all about and they find chips and dip and soda and stuff like that, but Jughead then explains why they were all invited there, for them to give them a Christmas present…of a special Christmas rap!
At that point, everyone should have left. That would have been the only honorable response. But instead, they encouraged Jughead and Chuck and all stayed.
There is a truism in fiction involving video or audio that you’re almost never going to find a good rap written for a TV show or movie. However, that moves to about 99.9999% unlikely to be good if it is in a written medium like prose or comic books. And, well, this is no exception (I mean no disrespect to Wilcox, as it’s just impossible to do. If you don’t have a beat, it’s just a weird sort of poem. It’s never going to work). Goldberg and Esposito draw it well, at least…
The rap also involves props, because of COURSE it does, and a sort of dance and Chuck’s girlfriend, Nancy, is somehow incorporated into the rap…
Now, one clever bit from Wilcox is when Jughead and Chuck turn to the others and ask what they thought of the rap, they all change the subject, which makes sense, because, really, what can you really say at that point?
The odd thing, though, is that the teens all then turn to the readers and tell them that they’ll see them soon, which is weird, because isn’t that the case for the end of EVERY comic book? Why would a Christmas celebration be any different than a normal comic book?
I get the “Merry Christmas” stuff and, again, I love that they just skip over whether they liked the rap or not, but the “See you soon!” and “Hang tight!” stuff really doesn’t track. There’s no winter break for comic books, ya know? At least Jughead did not try to work “Sugar Sugar” into the rap. Thank heaven for small favors!
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