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There's a New World Coming
Date: 1974
Publisher: Fleming H. Revell
In the early '70s, Al Hartley, a top artist at the Archie mill, turned his talents to alerting America's children to his evangelical beliefs. Working with Christian publishers Fleming H. Revell, Hartley ran Spire Christian Comics, an imprint that published gems such as Hansi: The Girl Who Loved the Swastika (smartly reviewed at Mystery Island) and even some off-brand Archies in which the boy with the hashtag haircut brags about the amount of prayer going on at Riverdale high. (Kliph Nesteroff has put together an exemplary history.)
In this memorable issue, Hartley teamed up with apocalypse profiteer Hal Lindsey, author of the crackpot classic The Late, Great Planet Earth and other really-the-end-is-coming-any-day-now nonsense that continues to this day.
Hartley adapted Lindsey's accounts of the imminent Day of Judgement, which presented some challenges, chief among them, "How does an all-ages comic book handle characters like the Whore of Babylon?"
Hartley cleaned her up, but somehow other filthiness snuck in:
Hartley and Lindsey document all of the now-familiar signs that prove God is thisclose to stopping the car of existence and turning around:
That last panel shows one class where you do not want to see the extra credit assignment.
PostRapture, in the world of the great snatch, the lost souls will be saved by an unlikely source:
This multitude of Billy Grahams -- emerging one after the other from Israel like clowns from a car -- will then instruct the world in a simple message:
THIS IS THE SINGLE DIRTIEST PAGE IN COMIC BOOK HISTORY.
Anyway, when the 144,000 Billy Grahams teach you to drink from your fountain, this is the song they will be grooving to:
Next: The actual Archie stares down history's greatest horror
