Jughead, Vol. 1 by Chip Zdarsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I learned a thing!
There’s a great joke in this book about Jughead’s name, and it got me thinking. “What is a jug, anyway?”
I found out. It’s not that exciting. It’s a cup but different.
But THEN I found out how Jughead got his name!
Okay, here we go.
You know that crown he wears? Well, in the original comics, it wasn’t a crown. It was a button beanie.
I read a great article about it (linked below), but basically, when a grown-up was done wearing a hat, like an old fedora or some crap, a kid would take it, flip it inside-out, and cut the brim off. The resulting hat looked kinda like a crown.
Kids decorated the hats with buttons, and there you go! Button beanie.
So how did this get to Jughead? The kids who wore these hats were called “jagheads,” not because they were fans of the military/law show JAG, but because of the jagged pattern created on their hats. And the assumption is that the name morphed into Jughead, just like Jughead’s hat morphed into a crown as time wore on, adults didn’t wear hats anymore, and kids stopped busting up their dads’ hats and putting a bunch of stupid buttons all over them.
Do I buy that theory? I dunno. Jaghead to Jughead? Why wouldn’t he just be called Jaghead? Or Beanie? Or…anything other than Jughead, really.
In the new continuity, Jughead got his name because he was once rich, then his father made a terrible investment in some sort of jug-related business, and the kids on the playground started calling him “Jughead” as a result. Kids can be so cruel. Also, clever. Which makes the cruelty that much worse because sometimes you’re like, “I gotta hand it to that kid, that was pretty good.” You’re mad, but the anger is tempered by a little bit of the realization that some slams are just too good to pass up.
Anyway, all I’ve really got are two theories about Jughead’s name. The in-continuity theory and the real-world theory. But both are good enough. Frankly, I don’t care a lot. I’m glad to be reading comics where a character is named Jughead.
Also, I’m told that there have been attempts to update Jughead’s hat to be a baseball hat. You can just take that idea and cram it with walnuts.