Awesome Comic List

Kottke linked to this great comic book list. It's more of a list of categories - comic categories that you should have in your life. It includes Archie Andrews, which made me smile deep inside. I still remember the day, like it was yesterday, when I realized my feelings for Betty Cooper were far different than any I'd ever felt about a girl in my life. I was 7, on the bus ride home from school. Here's what he says about the Riverdale gang.

8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics

I always think people should own a few Archie Comics, as some of them are very good and even the very bad ones teach us something about the way comics of a certain kind have become commercialized and formulaic over the last half-century. The core five-member cast make-up and their relationships to one another is one of the best set-ups anyone's ever figured out for situational comedy, and two of the pairings within that group of five -- the iconic Betty and Veronica duo and the underrated Archie and Jughead team -- work almost as well on their own. Don't shy away from Bob Bolling's excellent Little Archie comics as part of your array.

I was always partial to Dan DeCarlo's work on Archie. Then last year, while at a comic book store, I stumbled across a metric ton of old erotica comics that DeCarlo did - stuff straight out of Playboy, in fact. Never knew, but in retrospect, if I had to guess, I probably fell in love with a Dan DeCarlo drawn Betty Cooper that day.