Archie lets Betty, Veronica and Midge know he’s available for the Switch Dance, expecting only one of them to take him out.

You wouldn’t think it at first glance, but this six-pager is almost subversive in the way it upends Archie tradition, and not just because Archie is dating one more girl then usual. Not only do they acknowledge Archie’s strange predilection for double-booking, but in this case Archie has an out. He can gracefully decline two of the offers without trouble. Yet he’s overcome with a destructive compulsion to up his game.

The other truly strange aspect of Three Queens And A Joker is its structure. The reason I chose this story at all was because it reminded me of what Grant Morrison attempted to achieve with Final Crisis, of all things. The dance is represented by a rapid succession of panels that only show a fragment of what’s going on at any given time, as if every other panel went missing.

Typically, this kind of story gets the set-up out of the way quickly in order to shift into the slapstick, that is, Archie’s attempts to juggle multiple dates at once. Here, we don’t even get into the dance until page five, and Betty, Veronica and Midge only appear in two panels apiece. The story trades on our anticipation of the girls’ reaction to Archie’s womanizing without actually showing it.