In this essay I spoke of the ARCHIE franchise as "damn close to being anti-epistemological." I don't believe it's impossible that somewhere, someone did a story that meets my criteria for epistemological myth. But if there's even one, it's buried under thousands upon thousands of average stuff.
And then I came across this near-myth, probably both written and drawn by Al Hartley, whimsically titled "Bus Fuss." I gasped at the first page, in which Principal Weatherbee is seen having the seats of a bus taken out, and Jughead quips that the old fellow has "flipped his lid over the school busing thing." Gasp, thought I. Is an ARCHIE comic going to say something about desegregation?
Instead, Weatherbee has a different sort of bee in his bonnet, not political in the least. He's taking everyone on a trip into the Great Outdoors, not only the most prominent teen regulars but also three teachers, the janitor and the lunch-lady. In other words, the lesson to be imparted is not for kids only, and it begins with a prayer. "Can we do that in school?" asks Jughead in his atypical Confederate cap. "We're not in school now," responds Betty. Weatherbee's prayer contains no specific religious allusions, only invoking the protection of the creator as they journey to see "the beauty of your creation."
For the next six pages, Weatherbee gives his captive audience a Cook's tour of natural wonders, with no other religious context, beginning with the importance of trees and their wood by-products to the early American settlers. I like the fact that Hartley isn't so evangelical that he misses a chance for a covert reference to the canine love of trees. He also throws in a tiny bit of conflict at the end of page six.
The bear's advent forces everyone back into the bus while the ursine intruder eats all their food. Jughead rages about the loss of the victuals, which prompts Weatherbee to take a shot at the lunch-lady: "[the bear] will pay for it. Miss Beazley prepared that food." Nothing daunted, the next day the improvised camper travels to a local range of mountains. Though Weatherbee reductively assumes that ancient peoples revered mountains because of volcanic activity, he nevertheless draws upon the archaic sense of the numinous by mentioning their connection to deities (which of course they also have in Judeo-Christian belief).
And to top off the rambling quasi-lecture, "the Bee" then shows his charges their insignificant place in the universe by pushing them to look up at the stars, untrammeled by the interference of civilization. And with that simple but non-denominational revelation, the story ends and they descend to "find our place in the scheme of things."
I had read two or three of Al Hartley's "Archie gets religion" stories and found them heavy on Christian proselytizing. But here, even though all of the other stories in this issue are just routine teen hijinks, with Weatherbee playing the fool, this lead tale was refreshingly subtle. I'm not sure I even know why Hartley even gave this gently spiritual story a goofy title like "Bus Fuss," unless he just anticipated that his editors would expect such a title. "Fuss" is not elaborate enough to be a fully epistemological myth, but at least it has some of the right ingredients.
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