Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week Bennett skips the column, and just does the digressions. 

Two weeks ago, as its title would suggest (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--The Deal With Jughead") I had some questions, well one question actually, about Archie's particular friend Jughead.  By which I mean his major indifference to girls and how they would deal with it once the character gets his own more realistic New Riverdale-branded comic.  Since then Archie has announced that in October we can look forward to Jughead #1, and by "we" I mean me.  Because Zdarsky is the only writer since Steve Gerber who not only can write a Howard the Duck comic I can enjoy, he can write one so good that I don't resent someone other than Gerber attempting to write the character.

In that same column, I made one of my marginally tolerated vaguely 'amusing' digressions, this one about Bazooka Joe, once and future mascot for Bazooka Bubble Gum.  My obsessive-compulsive need to explain made me want to write about how the character had been dropped from his own product and hadn't appeared in a comic wrapped around a piece of gum since 2012.  But there were Bazooka Joe comics on the Bazooka web site as well as a campaign to give the character a new look.  I wanted to write all of that but didn't, feeling I couldn't justify that much unnecessary information in a digression.

Then a couple of days ago came the word that the campaign was over and Bazooka Joe 2.0 had been revealed.  In a piece that appeared in USA Today by Joe Truitt, "Exclusive: Meet the new-look Bazooka Joe," not only were we shown his modern makeover but we learned that his comics are back in the redesigned gum packages.  Life once again makes sense.

There was one more item of interest in that column.  In it I wonder how long it would be before someone decided that Fox’s new Fall show Lucifer (the one where the Neil Gaiman version of Lucifer Morningstar has been reduced to just another one of those 'gifted' bad boys who populate prime-time network TV police procedurals and can’t think of anything better to do than solve crimes) is an attack on Christianity.  Not surprisingly, according to a piece on Christian Post, 'Lucifer' Fox TV Series 'Mocks the Bible,' Says One Million Moms' Petition to Cancel the Show, the organization says the television series "mischaracterizes" Satan and "mocks the Bible."

On Gaiman’s Tumblr page he responded to the story:

"Ah.  It seems like only yesterday (but it was 1991) that the "Concerned Mothers of America" announced that they were boycotting SANDMAN because it contained Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans characters.  It was Wanda that upset them most: the idea of a Trans Woman in a comic book… They told us they were organizing a boycott of SANDMAN, which they would only stop if we wrote to the American Family Association and promised to reform.

"I wonder if they noticed it didn’t work last time, either…"

[for more on this story, see "One Million Moms Targets Fox"—ed.]

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.