Alyssa Rosenberg says in the July 16 issue of the Washington Post that “the plot turn of the forever-teenaged redhead dying is, shocking enough for a series that has focused on the stakes of everyday choices, but this week we learned more about that death: Archie would be fatally shot by an assassin targeting his friend, an openly gay senator campaigning for gun control.”
Archie gets shot defending an openly gay senator who’s fighting for gun control! I’d say that’s shocking. Besides, now poor Archiekins will never be able to decide between Betty and Veronica.
It’s bad enough that the conflagrations in Africa, the Ukraine and the Middle East are dragging us into WW3 and that gas is $4 a gallon, and that my back is killing me so I can hardly walk. But snuffing Archie out may be this cruel world’s darkest hour. And now the publishers of Archie apparently are hinting if they ever decided to bring him back they may bring him back as a vampire! As Charlie Brown would say, “I can’t stand it.”
Alas, like many of us, Archie wasn’t growing older gracefully enough. He’s 73-years old and sales of Archie comics have fallen precipitously from the heady days of 1969 when, according to Comichron data, “Archie” was the top comic in average paid circulation that year, beating staples such as “Superman.” “Betty and Veronica” was outselling both “Batman” and “Spiderman.”
So, a lot of people feel the old guy (like many of us) is no longer relevant (spelled Y-O-U-N-G).
A guy named Jonathan Last, blogging in The Weekly Standard, applauds the snuffing out of our red-haired hero. Last writes, “This (latest plot twist of killing Archie) makes sense as both a media strategy and a sales strategy,” Last says. “As young adult fiction has become increasingly sophisticated, increasingly popular and more widely available, Archie Comics’ sweet stories of first loves, first jobs and teenagers’ evolving relationships with their parents and teachers feel slightly anachronistic, or at least low-stakes. The company could have responded by going the ABC Family route, and spicing up YA stories with sex and violence.
“Instead, the franchise went in several different directions. It moved to make the core teenage stories more inclusive, recognizing that there was at least some hunger for representations of teenagers whose stories are often marginalized. In a moment of sharply declining print runs in comics, Archie Comics has made a canny assessment of the market and trends in criticism, and accepted that it might be better to be a politically niche product than an utterly irrelevant one. That is less a stunt than a recognition of market realities.”
Oh balls! I’ll bet the producers of Happy Days wouldn’t have turned Richie Cunningham into a lustful, woman-assaulting naval aviator just to make that show more relevant. At least I hope not.
In case you didn’t know, the first issue of Archie Comics, later just called Archie, appeared in the winter of 1942. It was drawn by Bob Montana and written by Vic Bloom. With the creation of Archie, publisher John L. Goldwater hoped to appeal to fans of the Andy Hardy movies starring Mickey Rooney. The comic is known for its many series featuring the fictional teenagers Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lodge, Reggie Mantle and Jughead Jones. Archie is set in the small town of Riverdale. While the location of the town is unspecified, John Goldwater attended Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York City. Drawings of Riverdale High School appeared to follow the general design of a high school, now City Hall, in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The “Thinker" statue still sits outside the front entrance, just like it did in the comic strip.
No comments:
Post a Comment