One word: Recycling. 😆
Quote from: SAGG on August 21, 2018, 04:28:28 AM
One word: Recycling. 😆
Oh, don't get me wrong... I'm aware that there are probably
hundreds of recycled cover gags distributed randomly through the various comics published over the decades by ACP. It still seems incredible that they'd used the same one on two consecutive issues of the same title, even if there WAS a 9-year gap between them. Obviously the common wisdom that applied was that almost
nobody who read REGGIE #14 would still be buying comics nine years later when #15 was released. But they had to realize that copies of REGGIE #14 would still be around in 1963, being passed down, traded, or re-sold, when they repeated that same gag on the very next issue #, and that at least a few people were collecting REGGIE comics, and would be certain to notice it -- almost as if they TRYING to draw attention to the fact that recycling cover gags was a common practice for the company.
The other thing notable about this particular gag is Betty's rather quaint usage of the slang term "scored" in the context of this gag, as a metaphor for LOVE. As in, "
scored" = "made
love" -- the actual reverse of its meaning in tennis terms, where if you HAVE scored, then you DON"T have "love". In tennis terms,
love is worth bupkis, nada, zilch --
scoring is what's important. If she wanted to speak more plainly and less delicately or euphemistically, she might have just admitted that she was frustrated because she hadn't managed to bang Archie yet. It seems like just another humorous gag at first glance, until you analyze it more minutely. Seems like the editor was asleep at the switch on that one.
That gag could very easily have been recycled from an earlier gag used in one of those sexy men's humor digests, with the girl in question drawn in a much more overtly sensual manner, and the strongly suggestive innuendo of that gag perfectly fits the requirements of a men's magazine cartoon. And in fact, I wouldn't be surprised to discover the same gag existed as a Dan DeCarlo cartoon that had been published in one of the digest titles he drew for publisher Martin Goodman. I just read an interview (BACK ISSUE #107) with George Gladir where he mentions that in the early 1960s, he was specializing in writing those single-panel gags for a LOT of different publishers, some of those "men's humor" digests among them.