Hot Dog

When people think of Archie comics, they typically think of a ginger kid trying to bang two chicks at once. Archie has lofty goals. If you’ve ever picked up an Archie Digest at the checkout stand and flipped through it, you’d notice that shit quickly gets ridiculous. There’s more continuity errors in an Archie comic than in the entire DC universe.

No one really thinks about him, but Archie is likely just as well known as Superman and Spider-Man, despite never having a big budget movie made after him. The reason for that is mainly how easy it is to pick up an Archie comic. They’re right there at the checkout stands of every grocery store, or in the magazine rack in a pocket-sized format. Comic book racks outside of comic book stores are a rarity these days, even in some book stores. Because of that, and because of it’s inoffensive G-rating, a kid is more likely to read Archie before reading a super-hero comic.

Archie has only had two cartoons. In one he and his friends had a rock band, ala Josie and the Pussycats. In the other, he was a paranormal investigator, ala X-Files.

Like I said, a lot of weird shit goes down in Archie comics.

Here’s an example:

Jughead’s Pal, Hot Dog. Usually you see a cover like this and not one of those things happens. Those aren’t day dreams: that’s Hot Dog’s real life. It’s an entire series based on Jughead’s pet dog. It’s like how Snoopy in Peanuts would pretend to be the Red Barron, only it doesn’t end with Charlie Brown coming out and saying, “Good grief!” In this comic, Hot Dog can talk, and has a secret base hidden inside his doghouse, to which Jughead is oblivious to because he’s too busy eating hamburgers. Plus, if you look at his mugshot up there in the issue number, he’s go his eyes closed and he’s facing the other way. Jughead always looks like he’s being smug. What a dick.

Hot Dog’s a secret agent, which strangely predates a current fad. Yesterday, there was a cartoon, “T.U.F.F. Puppy,” and a movie, “Cats and Dogs,“ on TV about dogs who are secretly… erh… secret agents. I’m not sure who came up with the idea, but someone is owed some money for plagiarism (TM).

It sort of figures. If you’re going to imagine your dog has all sorts of fun and adventures while you’re off whacking it into a baseball mitt, you might as well go all out and pretend they’re secret agents. That way, when you shake your head at him when he’s sleeping and make some sarcastic remark about how lazy he is, he’ll secretly wink to the camera. P.S.: Your dog hates you.

Is it weird that a Z-list character in a C-List comic company has his own series? Not really, when you consider that Superman’s dog Krypto had his own cartoon series. Jughead is Archie’s sidekick, and Hot Dog is Jughead’s side kick. The series didn’t last long, because it’s still a little bit of a stretch trying to sell a title like this. There’s lots of cutesy characters out there with a fan following already, like say, Heathcliff. It’s hard to build up an original property on the back of a virtually unknown one.