Betty & Veronica Go Native
A couple of weeks ago I decided to reconnect with a small (very small) part of my childhood. I with my research material for my writing, I threw the latest issues of a couple of Archie comics – namely, Betty & Veronica and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Yes. I used to read Archie comics. And the store was, in fact, sold out of any Jughead or Archie-based titles.
What struck me about Sabrina was that it had been redesigned from the ground up. The artwork, for one thing, had become a stiff-at-the-knees mass-production manga style. Beyond that, the story had become shoujo. Any vestige of the Archie character I had found through shorts in the old Double Digest mags was gone. Sabrina now studies magic at an all-girls magic school in another dimension, where one of her aunts sits on the board. In addition, Sabrina has gotten involved in a plot to depose the current queen.
Wait. An Archie comic with an ongoing plot? What now?
The second thing that struck me was just how wooden the Betty & Veronica comic had become. They were never paragons of great literature, but Archie comics always provided corny jokes and tight sweaters with an earnest sincerity that was almost… inspiring. But the artwork was stiff and the dialogue even more vacuous than I’d remembered – or maybe it was the fact that I bought a full-size comic and not the digest size, and the artwork was always bad at this size. I really don’t know.
But I do know that the stories – which used to meet a minimum level of logical sense – were full of absurd, out-of-the-blue twists that existed for no other reason than to push through hackneyed puns that were too old for Archie in the ‘80’s.
Oh, but it gets better. It turns out that the redesign bug has struck all of Archie comics. Hard. The new style is… realistic? I guess?
Actually, you know what? It turns out that the new look manages somehow to be even more bland and generic than the old.
Actually, I’m glad I was never a huge fan of Archie. If I had been, this would probably upset me to no end. As it is, it just seems… stupid.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
[...] wrote a couple of years (ouch) back about the redesign bug biting Archie comics. At the time, I had picked up an issue of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Betty & Veronica, and I [...]