It’s day 4 of 7 days of Jughead, and Jughead v2 #29 from 1992 is a big one. The thrust of the main story is the adage don’t judge a book by it’s cover. Major Spoiler Alert: Grandma Jones is friends with some skate punks who buy groceries for her and in return she lets them have band practice in her garage. Meanwhile Jughead is completely out of the loop. Spend some time with your Grandma Jughead, you never know how those punks will take advantage of her kindness… but it turns out the punks are tired of being misunderstood. They give (!) Jughead an extra skateboard, and Grandma Jones’ guitar teacher (wild!) encourages Jughead to be his own person, so Jughead reinvents himself as a skate punk! It turns out this short-lived character transformation was not well received by the Archie community… Yes, there is an Archie community. In any case, there’s a lot to unpack in my favorite episode of Freaks and Geeks… errr… uhm, Jughead.
It’s day 3 of 7 days of Jughead! This is Jughead Volume 2 #28 from December of 1991. The first thing you might notice is the corner box illustration which hints at radicalness as well as an announcement declaring the inside pages are made from recycled pages, which is a change from the recycled stories usually featured in Archie titles. This is actually kind of a crazy cover for this imprint, but it was the 90’s and you have to assume they were trying to stay hip.
You know my love for the Surf Punks. Futurismo is adding a rerelease of Locals Only to compliment the My Beach reissue. Unlike the My Beach reissue, Locals Only has two bonus tracks, and I’ve never heard them before. This is exciting to me, and at least one other person I’m sure. Be happy for me. Then take a moment to reflect on the fact that a band like the Surf Punks could not have crawled out of the primordial slime in any other time and place than late 70’s Southern California, and yet you have the import these masterful reissues from the UK.
Day two of 7 Days of Jughead features the story “Skateboard Fever” from issue 272 of Jughead, published in 1978. I don’ know why I didn’t go chronologically and post this one first, but I’m already posting Archie comics, so all taste and logic has gone by the wayside. This story is once again set in the hallways of Riverdale High. Poor Principal Weatherbee, or “the Bee” as Jughead refers to him, spent decades either purposefully or accidentally trying to learn how to skateboard, but he never gets the hang of it. Highlights include Veronica calling the guys “bean bags,” and Betty acting like a Karen – “It’s against the rules to skateboard in school!”
This is the beginning of the sacred holiday here at Skate and Annoy known respectfully as the 7 days of Jughead. We’ll see if I have the intestinal fortitude to actually follow through with it, so here goes. Let’s start with Jughead #13, AKA Volume 2 #13, from 1989. The first series started in 1949, but volume 2 started in 1987. This issue features story called “Roll Model” that takes place in the hallways of Riverdale High, like half of all Archie-realted skateboarding stories. Oh, the antics… The tomfoolery! Shenanigans!
Commercialized motorized skateboards have been around since as early as 1965, and every decade or so someone brings another one to market. In 1993 Tom Shanahan Inc expanded their small engine powered equipment for farms and yards to introduce the Powerboard motorized skateboard. The image and text on the right (above) come from Volume 17 #3 of Farm Show magazine in their section “New Products Especially For Women And The Farm, Ranch Home.” Farm Show is still around, but it appears the Tom Shanahan company has ceased to exist. It isn’t really mentioned anywhere on the internet except for some outlets where you can still find parts for some of their engines. These boards do turn up for sale, and some people have refurbished them.
It’s not the first time someone tried to bring skateboarding and/or Punk Rock to golf. It even predates those old excellent Nike SB commercials from their first toe around. I’m talking about High Speed Productions short-lived Schwing! magazine that was around from 1999-2001. Adidas calls the line Rolling Links, and near as I can tell… actually I can’t tell that there’s any skateboarding influence here at all. I guess you have to invent ways to hype product lines, and here it is, working, because you’re reading about it on skateboarding web site. Marketing seems kind of forced, right down the promo video with a tiny bit of skateboarding tacked on to the beginning and end.
From the folks at Brand X, life-size skateboard deck puzzles, AKA S8zzles. The name doesn’t exactly flow off the tongue, (I keep hearing “skuzzles” in my head) but you get the idea. The first 4 releases feature the classic Weirdo, a later era X-Dream, and the Brand X flavored Lester Kasai reissue deck featuring his famous Sims graphics in 2 color ways. What’s the connection? Brand X was started by Bernie Tostenson who did most of those early 80’s Sims graphics. I’m not sure how they are getting away with this copyright-wise, but The Brand X folks have a ton old screen printing films from the Bernie days, including Sims and Kryptonics artwork. The thing that makes these skateboard puzzles more interesting (and expensive to produce) is the decision to die cut these puzzles in the shape of the actual boards instead of just leaving them on a rectangular background. Check it out in the Cool Stuff category.
It was way back in 2009 that rumors were floating around about a possible rebirth of the Turf when the current tenants were allegedly not going to renew their lease. That turned out to be false, or so we thought. Then it turned out to be sort of true again, in that they had obviously vacated the property during the freeway ramp construction, which led to the temporary excavation in 2010. The locals didn’t give up! In 2019 it was announced that WDOT sold the land to the city of Greenfield for one dollar. The plan was to turn it into a new (old) skatepark, the old bowls would be brought back to life and new terrain would be added outside the existing footprint. Why can’t I find an internal S&A link to that story? We must have been on hiatus… Great news right? Would they do it? Yes! I had always been skeptical about the ability to just patch up the old bowls and add some new coping, and apparently I was right. They ended up scrapping that plan and instead took “detailed 3 D sonar” scans of the bowls that would allow them to excavate and rebuild as close to the original as possible. Let’s talk about that after the jump, OK?
