Um, holy shit: this weekend, at a San Diego ComicCon panel called “Comics & Pop Music: Making New Noise,” Archie Comics’  Alex Segura and Matthew Rosenberg announced an impending special issue wherein the fictional bubblegum pop band the Archies will meet real-world ur-punks the Ramones. Via Comics Alliance:

Segura: “Matt got in touch with the Ramones’ people, and they were super into it. So I reached out to Gisele [Lagace, illustrator], whom I’d worked with before on the “Occupy Riverdale” story and other things. We’re all huge Ramones fans, and though it took a while to work out the details, once things started moving, it actually went pretty quick. It’s gonna be a super-fun oversized one-shot, with covers by some truly amazing artists (whom I can’t announce just yet), and it syncs up nicely because it’ll be the 75th Anniversary of Archie, and the 40th Anniversary of the Ramones… It’s really kinda like a dream come true to be doing this.”

While the pairing may seem counterintuitive at first glance, the Ramones drew a lot of inspiration from bubblegum music. I recall once reading a quotation that I can’t just now find—Joey Ramone saying the band formed with the intention of being “a nouveau bubblegum group with guts.” And indeed, it’s mighty easy to imagine songs like “Rockaway Beach” or “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”  being 1910 Fruitgum Company, Archies, or Ohio Express covers, which they of course are not. And Johnny Ramone once offered this info to the Guardian:

“I hate to blow the mystique,” Johnny Ramone once confessed, “but we really liked bubblegum music, and we really liked the Bay City Rollers. Their song Saturday Night had a great chant in it, so we wanted a song with a chant in it: ‘Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!’ on Blitzkrieg Bop was our Saturday Night.”

This won’t be the first time the Ramones have been cartoonified. Dangerous Minds told you about the wonderful animated video for “Chain Saw” just a few months ago, in fact. Here’s another, an amusing mashup of the Ramones with the Flintstones.
 

 
Hat-tip to Derf

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Eye-popping Bad Brains and Ramones’ cartoons that will rock your world
Sex Pistols and The Ramones as Hanna-Barbera cartoons