On his old TV show Steve Allen had a
great bit, where he would open the daily newspaper and read aloud the Letters
to the Editor, sent in by cranky readers.
Steverino would declaim in a voice of sputtering indignation, making the
complaints seem absurdly overheated. “Dear
Editor: Now you’ve gone too far! This is too much! I am truly peeved! Enough is enough! You have lost my business! Signed, Irate!” And we would all laugh at the extravagant,
operatic outrage being expended on the pettiest of grievances. The things people get worked up over!
Well, I am truly peeved. Someone has really gotten my goat.
I was on Facebook last week, and in the course of my
browsing I glanced over at the Trending
side-bar, which is an essential tool for the modern social-media maven (“What’s
trending? Who’s trending? Am I trending?”), and there I saw three words
that acted like a syringe of ice water to my veins –
“DEATH OF ARCHIE”.
Death of Archie?
Archie who? Surely not ----?
Yes, Archie Andrews.
Son of Fred and Mary Andrews, perpetual student at Riverdale High
School, fickle beau of Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge, habituĂ© of Pop Tate’s
Chocklit Shoppe, lifelong rival of Reggie Mantle, friend of Jughead Jones.
Archie is dead.
Or will be, come July.
The bastards are killing him off. In the final issue of the infelicitously-titled
“Life with Archie” series, the beloved comic book character will be murdered - knifed
or shot, trying to help a friend, thus dying a hero’s death. I
don’t know the specifics, but there’s a picture of Archie on the sidewalk, or
maybe it’s a subway platform, and there’s blood pouring from his stomach, and
Betty and Veronica are by his side while spectators stand by with anguished
looks.
This is not the way I wanted Archie to go. I thought he would last well into his golden
years, happily married to Betty (we all know that if he’d married Veronica
first, the marriage would have foundered swiftly under the weight of economic inequality,
and Betty would have snagged him on the rebound, fresh from her own misbegotten
marriage to that slick-haired heel Reggie).
They would have had a brood of little Archies, male and female, who
would have followed in Dad’s madcap footsteps, and then there would be
grandchildren and a whole spin-off industry.
Archie would join the country club and drive a Prius, and finally
succumb from old age, surrounded at his
bedside by family and remaining friends.
Jughead would be there, gray-haired and feeble but still wearing that
inane pointy hat.
But no.
Instead, he’ll be cut down in his prime, barely out of college, his
whole fictional life ahead of him, leaving the rest of us with nothing but
questions. No more Archie - how can this
be? Why
can this be? What backroom genius
hatched this benighted idea, and who approved it? I can imagine the creative honchos gathered
around a table, trying to cobble together a neat gimmick to revive their tired
franchise. Up pops a bright young man
with an outside-the-box vision: “How about this? Archie dies!” A bewildered pall sits over the gaggle, as
the enormity of this suggestion seeps into their collective brainpans like oil
from a leaky filter. “Archie dies? But Archie is our raison d’etre. Archie is our
tentpole character!” “Tents are for wimps!” the young man replies, and with
such savvy conviction that it almost appears he has said something
meaningful. “This will be a
game-changer! It’ll be hailed as a bold
narrative leap, and a searing social statement! And it will make us a bucket of
cash!” Now the idea passes around the
room from one bean-counting head to the next, and a consensus forms. Somebody starts to do the Slow Clap, and the
Young Man beams, besotted with himself and his transformative mind.
All well and good for the suits. For the rest of us, this is
confounding. It violates everything
we’ve learned about the comic universe. Nobody
dies in the comics, especially not in Riverdale. Crusty money-grubbing Mr. Lodge didn’t
die. Nor did the morbidly obese Mr.
Weatherbee, or the dessicated Miss
Grundy. So why Archie – Archie, the very
spirit of youth and promise, the can-do kid, the guy you wanted to be best
friends with, because he was popular but not stuck-up, he drove a cool jalopy
and he had plenty of girls around him, including his foxy cousin Josie, who was
a band chick and you know what that meant – a ringside seat at the submarine
races!...Why does Archie have to go? What’s the point? Is the comic-book world really better off
without him?
Not to worry, the publishers say. Archie’s
not really gone. His earlier adventures will continue, in the regular Archie
series, where he’ll still eat pizza and ogle bikinis. There will always be an Archie!
But it’s no
fun now. How can I take pleasure in
17-year-old Archie’s juvenile escapades when I know that five scant years hence
he’ll be clutching his punctured gut and gurgling a death rattle as he drifts up
towards the light? His teenage life
was ordinary enough; now it will retroactively become trivial and clueless.
And given this new somber direction, what’s going to
happen at the funeral? Will Moose break
down at the casket and declare his forbidden love for Archie? Will Big Ethel hook up with Dilton Doiley and
repair to some motel off the interstate in a sad and desperate attempt to rewrite
the past? Afterwards, will Veronica
forsake her wealth and join one of Bono’s African crusades, will Betty start
hitting the bottle and become a bloated mess haunting the aisles of WalMart?
Where, in other words, did all this gassy pretentious
solemnity come from, and where is it going?
It all started, I suppose, with Marvel, and their embrace
of the neurotic superhero. Prior to
that we had the mighty DC crew:
Superman, Batman, the Flash, Wonder Woman; simple, straightforward
characters with no dark brooding inner torments. All
they cared about was Truth, Justice and the American Way. They saved the world, and then went back to
whatever they were doing. Then along
came Spiderman and the Hulk and all those other conflicted Mutants with Issues. And people – that is to say, the more
evolved nerds - lauded the introduction of mature themes and adult conflicts. Finally, comic books were growing up.
But why should they grow up? They’re comics,
for christ’s sake. Books, with pictures, for
kids.
Every Sunday after church, we would go to the
stationery next to my grandparent’s house, and buy a handful of comic
books. My grandfather would give us a
dollar and say “Here, get some for everybody”, and my brother and I would pick
out our favorites – Jack loved Superman and Action Comics, I preferred Batman
and Flash, but in lieu of that we would grab Justice League of America, Green
Lantern, Richie Rich, Beetle Bailey, Casper the Friendly Ghost – we’d get my
cousin Gail a copy of either Wonder Woman or Wendy the Good Little Witch, but
we would read them first – and we’d also grab an issue or Archie, or Betty and
Veronica, or any of the various Riverdale collections.
And after breakfast we would sit on the overstuffed
chairs in the living room and read them.
We, the kids. Nobody else. Grandpa paid for them, but he didn’t read
them. He read The Journal-American, and The Sporting News, and Grit and Steel, the official magazine of competitive
cockfighting. He apparently read
Playboy, which we occasionally found stashed in the back of the magazine rack,
and I’m sure he enjoyed the sophisticated cartoons scattered therein. But he didn’t read comic books. Because they were for kids.
I have no problem with Marvel raising the stakes and
making their superheroes complex and “interesting” (although I can live without
the ponderous noisy semi-Wagnerian movie versions of same), but you can easily ride that gravitas train into a cul-de-sac of pomposity, where dramatic license checkmates
common sense and the narratives become as weighty and overstuffed as my
grandparent’s chairs. And killing off
Archie Andrews is, I submit, the tipping point.
Archie simply doesn’t lend himself to serious
consideration. He’s got freckles, and
he wears varsity sweaters and sneakers, and he drinks milkshakes. That’s as deep as he gets. He also has some
kind of hashtag on the side of his head, which denotes something inscrutable
about his hair. The only major
discussion his comic-book world has ever generated is the parlor game of
personal taste that supposedly illuminates the landscape of the individual male
psyche: Betty or Veronica?
The correct answer, of course, is “Betty” (just as the correct answer in the corresponding “Gilligan’s Island” is “Mary Anne”), and all guys know this.
They know that no girl outwardly identifies with Veronica, the spoiled entitled
rich Wasp, so to select her would
ipso facto demonstrate a total lack of appreciation for a real woman.
In his secret heart of hearts, however, the true answer
for any adolescent boy would be, I’ll take anyone: Veronica, Betty, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, whoever makes herself
available. Like I’m in a position to choose?
An even more measured response would be, none of
them. I would choose none of them because,
hello, they’re not real.
Some would chide me here for being too literal and
unimaginative. Don’t be so
pedantic! It’s just a game! We know they’re not real!
Do we? Do we
know that Tony Soprano is not real? Do we
know that Hans Solo and Yoda are not
real? Do we know that Bill O’Reilly is
not real? (see, now it gets tricky)
The Betty/Veronica litmus test is harmless enough as
a sociological experiment. It’s when
the borders between reality and fantasy get redrawn more often than a
Congressional district that we have to wonder, how much undeserved weight can we keep giving to these
childish otherworlds before our ability to distinguish true value, and the
value of truth, completely collapses?
Identifying with fictional characters or
famous personages from the past is nothing new. There have always been people who thought
they were Napoleon or Julius Caesar. But
unless they had a great deal of money at their disposal, they were considered
nuts. Nowadays, we’re not so
judgmental. Maybe they’re channeling. Maybe they’re performance artists. Maybe they’ve stepped through a wrinkle in time.
This tradition of delusional identification is given
a populist twist on Facebook, with the ubiquitous “What character from Harry
Potter/Downton Abbey/Mad Men/Game of Thrones/ The New Testament/50 Shades of
Grey are you?”
You answer a few flattering personality questions,
and then you get to declare, “I’m Lord Grantham!” “I’m Hermione!” “I’m Gollum!”
“I’m the Second Thief on the Cross, the
one who befriended Jesus and told the other thief to shut up and die already!” (full disclosure: I’m Bates)
Now theoretically we all realize that we’re not
these fabricated characters and they are not us, and we’re just engaging in a
lighthearted lark. Right?
I'm not sure. When seemingly sensible people spend hours
upon hours fighting XBox zombies and surfing cat videos and gorging on
“reality” shows which are about as real as unicorns – watching semi-actors
wrestle catfish and build duck decoys and buy houses in Costa Rica and raise
octuplets – when our friends and neighbors spend half the waking day living
other people’s lives - I have to wonder.
But as you see, I’ve fallen into the trap
myself. I’ve started taking reality
personalities and video avatars and comic book characters seriously.
When I was a kid, my favorite magazine of all time
(before I lost my innocence and became addicted to “Mad”), was “Famous Monsters
of Filmland.” It came out once a month, and featured articles on all the great
monsters – Frankenstein, Dracula, etc. – both in their original Universal
incarnations and their full-color Hammer revivals. Other monster movies were spotlighted too: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Incredible Shrinking Man, the Amazing
Colossal Man, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the Monster from Piedras Blancas, The
Thing from Outer Space…All manner of beasts were represented.
I loved monsters as a boy, and that magazine spoke
to me like no other. It was edited by
Forrest J. Ackerman, as heroic a figure to me as JFK. He treated monsters seriously, as I
did. The worst monster films ever made
were accorded respect in his pages.
In the back of this seminal magazine, as in all
comics, there were ads and offers for all kinds of interesting novelties. You know, joy buzzers and sea monkeys, and
the famous X-ray glasses which could see right through a woman’s clothes –
yowza!
And one time, a set of Monster Decals. Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy… Six in
all. Stick them on your wall, on your
car window. Scare the bejeezus out of
your friends! For a mere 3.99, these
fearsome, frightening creatures can be yours!
I had to have them.
I talked my mother into sending a check, and I paid her back with my
communion money. My mind raced with the possibilities. I would put a Frankenstein decal on my
bedroom door, and a Wolfman decal on my bookbag, and a Dracula on the
refrigerator…!
I waited months.
The ad said, “allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery.” It took longer than that. Every day I checked the milk box where the
postman left our mail. Every day,
nothing.
Finally, a small envelope arrived, and I recognized
the return address. Puzzled but excited,
I opened the envelope, and pulled out a small single sheet. The decals were attached. There they were, Frankenstein, Dracula, the
whole crew. Frightening and fearsome, and no more than two inches tall.
I was devastated.
They were barely bigger than the ad.
And their heads were comically oversized, so that they looked less like
monsters than munchkins. It was reminiscent of that scene in “This is
Spinal Tap”, when the miniature Stonehenge is revealed. This is it?
I waited three months for this cheap crap?
Even though I knew they weren’t directly responsible
and had merely sold the ad space to some third-party shyster, my faith in
Famous Monsters and Forrest J. Ackerman was forever tainted. How could
they allow their devoted readers to be rooked like this? How
could they impugn the integrity of their own monsters?
That’s when I knew the game was rigged. Buy into our fantasy, swallow our belief
system, and we’ll dash your dreams on the way to the bank.
It’s no different now. The Archie-killers can make all the grandiose
claims they want about taking bold narrative risks and injecting gravitas and
delivering a moral statement for our times, but we all know the real goal is to
gin up sales before they close the books on an ill-advised business venture. They don’t have any real understanding of the
Archie ethos, and they don’t care.
And if Archie were alive today, you know how he’d
feel about this transparently craven assault on his legacy? Well, he’s too wholesome and all-American to
say it, but I will:
It’s baloney!
And I think Pop Tate and Miss Grundy, and even Reggie, would agree.