The early 1970s were a strange time, especially within the greater Riverdale-Midvale metropolitan region. While other communities struggled with the lingering fallout of the socio-cultural upheavals of the previous decade, the stomping grounds of Archie Andrews and company became a Lynchian tapestry of nightmares lurking behind a false front of suburban tranquility. Demonic possession and the manifestation of face-melting evil were all too real concerns, and even an an otherwise “typical” American teenager could be a practitioner of necromancy most foul.

It was a time when even the most innocent of actions, like finding a curiously-scented pendant on the sidewalk, could yield horrific consequences….as a young Miss McCoy discovered in Josie and the Pussycats #67 (February 1973).

Contact with the pendant causes a strange transformation within the red-headed singer, turning her against her friend and filling her head with strange concepts about enlightened self-interest and the inherent evil of public libraries.

Val Brown, the more level-headed member of the Pussycats, senses something might be amiss, and her suspicions are confirmed when she later spots a “lost and found” notice regarding the pendant in the local newspaper. She confronts Josie with this information, which leads to a tense moment where Val snatches away the pendant from Josie…only to fall under its control as well.  (Melody Valentine is a being of saintly perfection, and was therefore immune to such petty temptations.)

Val’s inner objectivist is far more cunning than her friend’s, however. Rather than covet the hateful bauble for its own sake, she sees it as an opportunity to extort some sweet reward money.

The pendant’s rightful owner, a rather disheveled mad scientist type who lives in a shack at the edge of the city, is so happy about recovering the item that he treats the trio of teens to one of his homemade roofie grenades.

As it turns out, the pendant was not actually a pendant, but rather an upscale crystal vial containing the culmination of the scientist’s life work…

…a form of liquid libertarianism so concentrated that it can not only obliterate all traces of human empathy, but it is also capable of making The Fountainhead look like a competently written work of literature.

With the Pussycats securely bound in the confines of his basement laboratory, the scientist decides to use this as an opportunity to secure more of the raw material needed to synthesize his wonder drug…

…but his plans for a mass trepanning party are foiled when Josie’s inner looter lashes out with a platform-sandaled foot…

…knocking the vial out of the scientist’s hand and into a barrel of motor oil, which neutralizes the drug’s effects. (Curious, given that my empirical studies have shown that petroleum, especially in corporate form, tends to induce or enhance feelings of extreme self-interest.)

Having “broken free” of the drug’s “spell,” the remorseful researcher apologizes to the Pussycats for for drugging, kidnapping, and threatening them with non-consensual decerebration…

…and this being a simpler time with fewer laws concerning violence towards women and minors, the girls accept his apology and floral parting gift, leaving the zany old coot to his urgent task of determining if he has enough quicklime on hand to dispose of the previous batch of victims mouldering sans cranial matter in the back of his root cellar.

I would like to point out that though my collection of Josie & The Pussycats comics from the early 1970s is rather small, the above story was the second instance of Josie falling under the sway of a malefic article of jewelry and the third instance of Josie succumbing to demonic or chemical influence during that era. I’m telling you, the Archie-verse was a dark place in those times.

Recommended listening: The Cramps – New Kind of Kick (from Bad Music for Bad People, 1984)

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On the heels of yesterday’s track by The Misfits comes a rip-snortin’ sonic concoction from the other (and arguably better) pillar of the American retro-punky-junky horror rock scene, a merry band of swamp demons who unearthed all manner of twisted nightmares from the graveyard of vintage rock ‘n’ roll.

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