I always figured them for the southern Atlantic coast in the US. Southern Virginia/North Carolina-ish…not quite far enough south for palm trees and still the occasional snowfall. Veronica’s family are obviously old money gentry. Tell me you don’t think her father would look right at home on the veranda of an old plantation house. Clearly,Riverdale is/was a sundown town to account for the lack of black people.
I always figured the point of Jughead’s women aversion was to have a character that younger readers could more easily relate to. Everyone in the story is boy-and-girl crazy, but Jughead just wants to eat burgers. Young Johnny Bravo related more easily to his problems than to Archie’s, though I enjoyed the hell out of the comics when I was a kid.
Now that we’ve got Jughead figured out, can we move on to Jughaid from Barney Google and Snuffy Smith? He’s always rejecting the advances of that little girl whose name I forget.
The tone always seems to be midwest – Ohio or Indiana or the like. But, yeah, an ocean nearby doesn’t match that very well.
Do people go surfing off New England? I thought that was a warm-water sport.
Maybe Riverdale is in Calisota.
Yes. There’s even a particular high season (same as hurricane season) and events
Tell that to these guys…
…or anyone who surfs in my hometown. IME, what most surfers care about are the waves, not the temperature. You can always wear a wetsuit, but you can’t surf a glass pond.
Good point, this. When I was watching Partridge Family, Danny was my hero more than Keith. Were I a bit older, I’m sure Keith would have been. Were I older still, I wouldn’t have been looking to TV shows for my heroes.
Coo! Ignorance fought. I’d never heard of New England surfing!
(You can canoe a glass pond, and it’s absolutely wonderful!)
Jughead was always my favorite.
He was the only character who knew what he wanted…and got it!
Great. Now let’s diagnose Calvin as having ADHD and put him on Ritalin.
Then explain that Beetle Bailey is anemic, and just needs more iron to make him less lazy and more productive.
Oh, and we need a Very Special Hi and Lois series where Thirsty bottoms out and joins AA.
Why let a comic strip character just be funny when we can make him an object lesson for unwashed masses?
The problem that you have there is that you’re equating asexuality to some sort of medical dysfunction. Which is kind of fucked up.
Well, actually, the other problem you have there, is you named a bunch of other comics that haven’t been funny in, at a minimum, three decades. If Hi and Lois disappeared tomorrow, would anyone under the age of seventy really care? Not to disparage the tastes of the elderly, but there’s an entire slate of comics that are probably going to disappear over the next twenty years, because their readership is dying off, and there’s nobody to replace them. How many fans are there for Hagar the Horrible that weren’t fans in 1950? Probably not a ton. Archie’s making a deliberate decision to do their best to still exist in 2030. I’m honestly not sure how many of the comics you just named will be able to make the same claim.
Which, of course, is your third problem: Archie comics have seen their sales increase ten fold with their modernized reboot. If diagnosing Beetle Bailey with anemia could generate the same numbers, wouldn’t the business that owns that strip be a fool for not trying it?
That is Archie meets Degrassi.
Damn. Miller stole what I was going to say. 
Asexuals have existed since the beginning of time, and yet they are poorly represented in culture. The only comic I ever read as a kid was Archie (I preferred Little Archie, though). I hated Betty and Veronica. I hated Archie and Reggie. But Jughead? That was my boy right there. He was the only one I could relate to in that world. Everyone else gave too many fucks about non-important things. But not Jughead. All he wanted was food and laughter.
If it hadn’t been for Juggie, I don’t think I would have bothered reading.
Well, HTH first appeared in 1973, so I guess that would be “All of them.”
I only discovered Hagar in the 90s, and loved him. Alas, there’s a terrible sameness to him: the strips only have a few distinct jokes. I bought some ten or twelve of the paperback collections, then stopped.
(Not as limited as Marmaduke! Only single solitary goddam joke for 61 years!)
Of course, Archie comics also have a pretty limited repertoire of jokes. The love triangle, Jughead and food, Moose and Midge, the grownups don’t understand the kids (except Pop, who does,) and, oh, Betty and Veronica wear the same swimsuit: horrors!
(Nicely handled by Photoshopping, so Veronica wears the top and Betty wears the bottom…)
Zonker Harris has been asexual all along, although I don’t know if he’s ever used the label. He claims that a girl broke his heart when he was ten and he decided then and there that love wasn’t worth the trouble.
And I wonder about both Gilligan and Maynard G. Krebs.
Still can’t understand everyone’s fascination with this. It’s nothing we haven’t known since the sixties.