A Peppy Development on Riverdale

 Oh, I see...

the newest development on the show Riverdale (which, yes, is still a thing) is one which has utterly confounded everyone as being incomprehensibly beyond the pale, even for a show that has exemplified "madness" as method.

To me, on the other hand,

it's the first thing on the show that has made any sense in YEARS.

Not that I've been watching, of course; I value my sanity too much.  

A difficult choice.

But reading about this latest episode, which deals with the after-effects of a bomb exploding at Archie's house, sent me dashing to television to watch. In short, Archie and Betty should probably be dead but instead...

they have superpowers.

Betty has some sort-of "Spider-sense" ability (very useful when you are an FBI agent) and Archie has mysteriously picked up a lot of extra mass, becoming extra dense (no jokes) and his skin becoming nearly impervious (which is why he and Betty, whom he was in front of, survived the blast).

Let me think REALLY hard about that.

• A red-headed male.
• Who was the star of Pep Comics.
• Who gains the power of superstrength and impervious skin.

It took him some 80 years. But the ever-insidious Archie finally has replaced the Shield fully.

By BECOMING The Shield.

The Suicide Club, Part 5: The Final Destination

Joe "The Shield" Higgins has maneuvered Grigas, the president of the Suicide Club, into being the one who kills him in his disguise as Jim Phillips (with the understanding that Grigas will turn himself into the police afterwards, because CLUB RULES).

This scene is very much the Earls of Mountararat and Tolloller:
"Oh, no, I insist; if one of us is to destroy the other... let it be ME!"

Naturally, Grigas tries to wriggle out of it because he's just a shyster with no interest in a murder rap; equally naturally, Joe insists, because he has what Freddie Freeman would call "bullet immunity".

That's some prime Golden Age crook-speak, folks.  I wish I could program my Alexa to talk that way:
"Alexa, I need a recipe for fasnacht."
"FaT chAnCe of mE fRyIng fOr yOu;
I'vE goT As muCh DoUgH aS I nEEd."

Dusty emerges from wherever he's concealed himself in his decidedly un-stealthy outfit;

I guess the "Mickey Mouse" is a reference to the "rat" of the previous panel; if there is one thing about the Golden Age that escapes me, it's the "sense of humor".

Meanwhile, Rogers, the other Suicide Club member who got the black ace, senses that the story is racing to a close and so, abandoning any pretense of arranging a death by comic book irony, just heads to the closest fatal traffic combo he can find.

Or maybe he was a rail lineman. Or a crossing guard. Or a millionaire program management analyst in the DoT Office of Railroad Safety.

But, as previously mentioned, interfering with transportation is the Shield's passion.

The Shield doesn't actually FLY, of course; it's just a concentrated application of innervation out of his pointy toes.

Now that he's flushed out the huckster out at the heart of it, Joe prepares to put fin to the Amway of autothanasia.

Yes, of course, they're lovers, and yes, he's the top.

Meanwhile, in the back room of the Suicide Club, unsupervised and underage Dusty, the Boy Psycho, rushes to give President & Mrs. Grigas a sickening beating before the Shield can show up to stop him.

Dusty is like Tom Holland and Taron Egerton had an XYY Syndrome baby and fed it nothing but steroids and uppers.

The Shield, sanguine at his protégé's savagery, is ready for the REAL fun:

I think Dusty needs some serious therapy.  I'm sure the upcoming holiday season with the Hangman will help.

emotionally abusing men who had were weak enough to be taken advantage of when they were already on the verge of suicide.

CLUCKS!

By subtle application of his innervation, I suppose, Joe, converts their despairing self-pity into righteous indignation.

Thus were Curtis Sliwa's Guardian Angels formed.

Later, in Joe Higgin's apartment...

WHICH I REMIND YOU MAY OR MAY NOT STILL CONTAIN THE ROTTING NAKED CORPSE OF JAMES FIELDING

Ironically, you'll notice that Grigas doesn't get executed (since he never actually killed anyone); he just gets life imprisonment.  Stills seems a little harsh; I was waiting for an amusing comic book irony panel when he gets sentenced to a lifetime of community service on a suicide prevention hotline while everyone else stands around laughing.

And MAYBE monkeys will fly out my BUTT.

Stop bluffing, Joe; not even Dusty the Boy Detective believes you're adroit enough to rig a cut deck of cards. You throw cars around, light yourself on fire, crash through walls; delicacy is not your long suit.

The Suicide Club, Part 4: Weekend at Bernie's

Over the corpse of finally-dead Phillips, the Shield explains the dying reference to a Suicide Club.

I'll be you a thousand Oreos he learned that from the Hangman.

Naturally, the Shield, being an FBI agent, calls the local police to come pick up the body.

"Hey, Dusty, I have an idea; d'ja ever see Weekend At Bernie's...?"

Oh. Um. Okay. Maybe they don't call the local police to pick up the body.  They just drive away with a corpse casually tucked in in between them.  After all, it is an isolated outdoor locale, where decomposition could set in pretty quickly. Maybe they drive it to the closest constabulary. Maybe they--

Wh--what...?

Well, there's something you don't read every day: to their apartment.  Not even to the Shield Cave, where the Shield underwent his innervation process and they could just lay the corpse on the Table of Pain & Pleasure. Nope; to their apartment.

I suppose the landlady is used to that sort of thing:
"Huh; usually that's how they look when they LEAVE!"

Joe props the corpse up for an impromptu reverse mortuary cosmetology lesson.

Apparently while obtaining a Ph.D. in chemistry (forgot that, didn't you?), a FBI agent's license to kill, and superpowers, Joe ALSO became a master of disguise in his spare time (which Dusty, the boy detective, is somehow utterly unaware of).  

"Gallopin' ghosts"? "Dead image"? You know, maybe sending Dusty to the Hangman for Christmas is the right thing to do, because the boy makes Alice Cooper look squeamish.  If Dusty does have a last name, I'll bet it's "Addams".

So, you think Joe had a suit identical to Phillip's lying around the apartment or is there currently a naked corpse sitting in his armchair at home?

Against all odds, Joe has absolutely ZERO problem passing himself off as this dead guy, even among his work colleagues.  My personal theory is that his "innervation" is a general energy field he can direct in any way he sees fit; say, to suddenly become a master of disguise or to cloud the perceptions of people who should clearly know that he's not Jim Phillips.  That would make him a sort of Golden Age Martian Manhunter.

That's absurd, of course, but no more absurd that his getting away with it WITHOUT that being the case. Sure enough, his goal to pose as Phillips to find the Suicide Club produces swift results.

Slink, slink, slink!

Unlike Oliver Queen, Joe Higgins' infiltration plans work and he's immediately swept into the arms of the Suicide Club, with the Boy Detective trailing him.

Masterful bluffing there, Joe.  Learn that from Hoover?

Joe-as-Phillips then does something that apparently has never occurred to any other member, despite it being universal and inviolable rule of any card play: he invokes the age-old right to Cut The Deck.  Using his magical power of innervation, I guess, he rearranges the cards so that the President gets the card requiring him to serve as his murderer.

"But... but... we'll have to get new signature cards on the Club's bank accounts now, and everything!"

As Shield stories go, it's a clever, passive use of the Shield's most basic power: he's invulnerable, so he's DELIGHTED to put President Grigas in the awkward position of trying to kill him. We'll see how that goes...

The Suicide Club, Part 3: Tough Luck!

We'd reached the point where the Joe "The Shield" Higgins and Dusty, the Boy Detective, enter the story of the Suicide Club by happening upon the runaway railway car that one its members, Jim Phillips, is using as a suicide vehicle.

Fun Fact: Dusty has no last name. At all. Ever.
I suppose if absolutely necessary on school forms he puts "Dusty Theboy Detective", but Dusty never actually goes to school anyway.

Dusty, being a boy detective, notices a single runaway train-car going the wrong way on the adjacent tracks.  The Shield attempts to intervene, because there is little the Shield loves more than interrupting the smooth progress of vehicular transports, be they aeroplanes, steamers, packards, locomotives, or department store escalators.

Speaking of hitting a curve, I defy you to make any sense out of the Shield's trajectory here.

Using radial lines of exertion, he arrests the train's motion.

The Shield is ENORMOUSLY disappointed to have saved only one person.
"Jeez, if I'd known, I wouldn't have bothered; it's my day off, you know."

Ever the boy detective, Dusty hastens to determine whether everything is under control, as if he could do anything about it, if it weren't.

"Well, yes, it's UNDER CONTROL, Dusty, if you consider my jumping out of the car and wasting a perfectly good S-curve and 17 exertion lines to stop a runaway train-car for ONLY ONE PERSON to be 'under control'."

Like a teeny tiny Sir Walter Raleigh, Dusty offers his kerchief to Jim Phillips.

We know who Dusty models himself after, and it ain't the Shield.

Jim Phillips (who is still trying to commit suicide) declines a ride from the duo.  This confounds them because, gosh, who wouldn't want to accept a ride from these two:

Tenso.

So, decidedly incurious, they leave the guy who was riding alone in a private railway car to his doom just standing on the railroad tracks.

"I really should getting around to giving you a codename some day, kid. Maybe a surname, too."

But, then Dusty makes the most dramatic attempted kerchief retrieval since the night the Cavalier dropped his own after leaping out of Killer Moth's bedroom, right before Captain Stingaree got home:

And when you only have one name, monograms are serious business.

Now, I could make a joke about how ridiculously gay it is that the Shield gave Dusty a monogrammed handkerchief, since that's probably the second gayest comic book panel I've ever seen, but I already shot my wad with the Cavalier joke so I have to move on.

"That's dangerous!" says the untrained orphan who's not even a circus aerialist but spends all his time with an indestructible superhero who runs headlong into hails of bullets.

Dusty has no quarrels with practitioners of voluntary self-euthanasia, BUT NOT WHILE YOU'VE GOT HIS MONOGRAMMED HANDKERCHIEF YOU DON'T, MISTER!

Let me tell you, the dry cleaner looks at you askance when you drop off a monogrammed handkerchief that's covered in human guts and been run over by a train. Particularly if you're underage. My mother used to have to do it for me.

Desperate to save his handkerchief in the vain hope that he might some day get a second initial to add to it, Dusty tackles Phillips off the trestle and, as the captions say, they tumble in the river below.

Called him a 'sap' he did; no stronger epithet in the Golden Age.

Terrific!

Fortunately, it works out okay

OH NO
NOT GWEN STACY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By "okay" I mean Dusty gets his hanky back; Phillips is dead from the fall. Dusty, of course, is unharmed, the impact no doubt absorbed by his preternaturally developed adolescent thighs. Unfortunately, with Phillips' neck broken, they are left with no clues about the Sui--

NYYAAAAAHWTFOMYGODHE'SNOTDEAD

Okay, that's is just NOT how broken necks work. At all.  Sigh; where IS Dr. Scott when I need him?

The Suicide Club, Part 2: Death or Wealth!

Self-unmade millionaire John Wayne, having been temporarily rescued from suicide by a vulture who hangs around casinos looking for desperate, losing gamblers, joins the wildly inappropriately jovial Suicide Club.

"AH HAHA we all used to be rich but now we are all broke and so darned thrilled about it we don our tuxedoes to come here every night to celebrate the fact! WELCOME!"

Club President Edward Grigas--don't try to figure out how one becomes president of the Suicide Club-- kinda-sorta explains the principles of the Suicide Club.

But not in too much detail because it doesn't make a lot of sense.

When I first read this, my reaction was that the concept of a "Suicide Club" was clearly a writerly concoction. It's exactly the kind of dumb idea that Golden Age stories are often built around.  You know how it was... While riding up the elevator to the offices of Exciting Comics, the writer tries to come up with a hook for the story he has to write by noon and thinks "what if there were an office building... for CRIME!?"  Then, whether that makes any sense or not, he tortures a Rube Goldberg plot into being around the central story conceit and simply forces it to work till his typewriter groans with the improbability of it all, then shoves it at the artist on his way out the door for a three-martini lunch with his secretary.

I'm well justified in that assumption, but I'm completely wrong.  As the Shield will helpfully explain later, the writer didn't make up the idea of Suicide Clubs; they have been (are?) are real thing, although they make no more sense in real life than in Pep Comics.

"DEATH OR WEALTH!
Coming this Fall on the Japanese Gameshow Network!"

Naturally, there is some sort of goofy selection process involved, because it wouldn't be comics without some sort of goofy selection process.  Being in a primitive era when the Planetary Chance Machine hasn't yet been invented and lacking a box of chocolates, the Suicide Club makes do with a deck of cards (which fits their whole gambling theme anyway).

Golden Age Drama Poses

Through no coincidence at all, two of the men we were introduced to already are chosen to kill themselves.

I remind you: the Club meets NIGHTLY, so just ponder that.

And now, let the suicides begin!

I honestly admire how efficient Golden Age writers can be in their storytelling sometimes. When they want to.

This, of course, is the part when the Shield and Dusty, the Boy Detective, enter the story, having spied Hendrich's odd behavior from afar and, through quick action, managed to save him from his hideous self-planned doom.

Oops.

Just kidding!  This is the Golden Age; MUST get a couple of horrific deaths in before the hero appears, you know.  I mean, some kid paid a dime for this book, after all, gotta give him his money's worth. So, at the same time, the other Suicide Club member is trying to off himself, too.

Why they let him do this is entirely unclear, except that they are slaves of plot.

Naturally, like the other guy, he has to do so in a way tied to his former wealth and prestige, because otherwise there is no comic book irony and while death without irony is okay, I guess, it's just not FUN, and after all, this cost a whole dime.

Based on the perspective in that second panel, I'd guess he's heading to see Doll man in Escher City.

It's all so BYZANTINE. The Hangman would kill ALL of them, for FREE.

Oh, NOW it gets REAL...