We always knew what Archie Andrews was daydreaming about — girls.
But Archie’s relentless obsession with romance left his pal Jughead Jones, who would never daydream about girls, free to fantasize about everything else under the sun, and he did.
In fact, for three issues in 1960, Jughead’s daydreams had their own comic book title, Jughead’s Fantasy.
Oddball free spirits in comics may not get the girl, but they do get to indulge themselves in the guilt-free joy of daydreams. That was as true of Jughead as it was of Walter Mitty and that famous author, attorney, BMOC, vulture and World War I flying ace Snoopy.
Like Popeye’s pal Wimpy, Jughead had an obsessively voracious appetite for hamburgers. In Son of Hercules by artist Samm Schwartz and scripter Sy Reit (Jughead’s Fantasy 3, December 1960), Jughead’s yen for chopped beefsteak inadvertently gives him a taste of superhuman power.
Granted super strength by an artificial hamburger he created in the Riverdale High chem lab, “Juggie the Juggernaut” proceeds to leap over lamp posts, lift pickup trucks, manhandle Moose and become a one-man football team.
Jughead’s dream about having superhuman strength — as well as earlier fantasies about being a knight in armor and a private eye— foreshadowed his appearance half a decade later as that surprisingly effective superhero, Captain Hero.
Jughead’s TV doppelgänger — Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis — had a similar experience two years later in the episode Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Gillis. After knocking back some of Prof. Dartmoor’s LYC-13 formula, the genial beatnik became a monster with superhuman strength.
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