Fucking Day: Katy Keene (Patreon)

We don't talk enough about Katy Keene. In my opinion, Katy Keene is the heart of the weird/horny vibe that permeates the Archie universe; she's the primordial ooze of the Archies, and yet Archie comics has never respected her. They literally misspelled her name the first time it ever appeared in print. It takes a lot of apathy to misspell a name you created. I know because my dad still calls me Lyndia sometimes.

Katy Keene the Pin-Up Queen was introduced in Wilbur Comics #5 as a girl that is very hot. That's it. Her whole personality is the noise a cartoon character makes when they see a lady so pretty their eyes and tongue pop out of their head. She's the physical personification of Awooga. Men are constantly catcalling her, and, of course, she loves it because this comic was released in 1947. The original Katy Keene comic is about Katy Keene's little sister, Sis, running a scam where men have to buy her ice cream for a chance to talk to Katy. "I should draw them changing clothes and include them both in the gratuitous panty shot," thought the artist.

Katy also forces her kid sister to take pin-up pictures of her and asks her advice on how to pose. I somehow don't believe a seven-year-old will know what a horny teenage boy wants to pin to his bedroom wall for teenage boy reasons. The introduction to Katy is basically an excuse to show pictures of a pretty woman in outfits so skimpy you could see her vagina if her anatomy were drawn correctly.

The thing you have to understand about Katy Keene is Katy fucks. She's not fully in charge of her sexuality. She has so many boyfriends, and those boyfriends have even less personality than her. Most of them don't even get real names. Katy got to evolve beyond her one dimensional 1947 debut, but the many men of Katy Keene are treated like bond girls. They are sort of there to hang around Katy and tell her how cool and pretty she is while she does her thing (which is being cool and pretty). They actually named a photographer, Click Lenz. Why not just call him Porny VanStudio?

I feel like these aren't Katy's boyfriends' actual names. It's just what she calls them because there are so many she can't keep track of everyone, and most dudes were named Bill back then anyway right? So her funny boyfriend is Chubby Chuckles, and her boxer boyfriend is K.O. Kelly. Her boyfriend with a former music career and current serious head injury is named Rock Enroe. She keeps their photos and names pinned up around her room in an attempt to keep track of everyone, but if she doesn't like you that much, you're getting stuck with the nickname Chubby Chuckles.

Katy is so gorgeous that her many boyfriends don't even care what she calls them. She's like, "Oh, you're a mechanic? Cool, I'm going to call you Beep Beep Dumbface from now on, ok?" And they love it.

K.O. Kelly is one of Katy's top three favorite boyfriends, and I think I know why. He's always wearing clothing with his name written on it. That way, Katy doesn't have to go through the trouble of trying to identify him. Seeing him doesn't trigger the part of her brain responsible for matching faces to names and lets her fill that available space with horniness.

Incredible horniness is one of the main components of Archie comics. The punchline of most of their jokes is Betty would Kool-Aid Man through a fucking prison wall for a chance to make out with Archie. I love that because it is authentic to teenage life. Veronica will risk breaking her legs for a ride on a snowmobile with two guys who might be hot.

The Archies are built on horny, and Katy is the horniest of them all. A man once sang her a song called "Making Love Ukulele Style," objectively the worst thing ever done, and she went on a second date with him. What can making love ukulele style possibly mean that's good? All I could come up with is it's quirky, plunky, and smaller than average.

The other big pillar of the Archie universe is that it's super weird. There's a whole multiverse now; Jughead is a time cop, Sabrina's Aunts are cannibals, and The Predator has hunted them all. Katy has always been as weird as modern day Archie comics have evolved to be. Her creator Bill Woggon liked to write himself into the books, often with Katy's little sister berating him for sucking at his job. The very first solo Katy Keene comic ended its first story with Woggon spilling ink on the page and Sis yelling at him. They were breaking the fourth wall before She-Hulk made it cool.

Once Katy got rebooted in the '80s, things got really wild. Sometimes a Katy Keene story is about Katy shopping for a new hat, and sometimes it's about capturing the leprechaun that haunts her friend Lucki Lorelei's family castle. That is a real example of a 1980s Katy Keene comic, and it's not the weirdest one.

Sometimes Katy fights Scooby Doo style monsters that are actually people in disguise, like when her boyfriend Ramon dressed up as a mummy to scare her friend Gloria. Sometimes there's just a straight up Leprechaun running around. There's no rhyme or reason as to when a supernatural thing will be real and when it won't. There's absolutely no canon to Katy Keene. It runs on Mario rules. Hot Mario, though; the fan fiction one.

Does Katy have superpowers? Technically no, but her hair can free float in space through a special ponytail hole on her helmet without killing her. This is the kind of magical realism I love. This is what imagination is for. Someday a woman will invent a device that allows our hair to look really cool in space, and this design will be the catalyst for it.

Also, she has a level of hotness that might be considered superhuman. Even the aliens want to bone Katy, and they don't even know if her genitals are compatible with theirs. Katy's hotness transcends species. Normally their type is someone with a couple more eyes and lobster claw hands, but gelatinous form or not, they are into Katy.

In this alien-themed issue, the aliens travel the galaxy to give Katy Keene a really good pair of shoes. She rightfully mistakes the gift for attempted murder. They don't know this in space, but when monsters show up and start lasering your apartment, your first thought isn't going to be, "Oh, this is probably fine. They must be giving my shoes superpowers."

The aliens fly away forever after zapping the shoes, but Katy quickly learns the laser beam gave them super speed. She uses them to run her errands super fast! A mobster notices her and tries to pry the heels off her feet to commit super crimes, but Katy manages to escape and throws the shoes in the river. Does knowing that alien life exists and wants to bang her affect Katy's life in any way? No. One page later, she's back to her old Katy antics getting digits at the Olympics. She's kind of like what Johnny Bravo would be if he were actually as cool as he thinks he is.

A lot of the appeal of Katy Keene was in the fashion. Her stories always included multiple costume changes, and the costumes were designed by readers who were credited in the comic. At one point, they even printed a bunch of women's names, addresses, and in some cases, ages, crediting them all as designers of one dress and suggesting they write to each other. Or you, know, do whatever you want with the information that a young girl who loves Katy Keene lives at this address! Wow, it was a different time.

Anyway, Katy Keene is the Superman of Archie. She’s the blueprint for the thirsty creeps of primetime CW fame and no one will ever do it better than this supernaturally good-looking woman. If they ever give an Eisner award for Best Orgy with Five Olympic Athletes, Katy Keene won’t show up to accept it because she’ll be too busy flirting with gremlins on the moon.

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