Questions of Earth-Shattering Importance Asked (and Answered)

hadriel and garething's daughter K is of an age (almost 10) where she's reading a lot of Archie comics (a lot). Seeing her while having a casual dinner with hadriel, wendy_licious and wackynephews it occured to me that I had read a lot of Archie comics when I was her age. So had my older siblings. In fact, kids that age have been reading Archie for longer then I've been alive. There must be thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Archie stories written.

So I got to thinking if they ever recycled the stories. Obviously they reprint some of the stories (that's the whole point of the digest editions), but with nearly 70 years of material they could get away with just redoing the art or retooling the dialog forever. After all, the target audience will typically only read the books for five years or so before graduating to more serious fare. They therefore have more material then they could ever need if they went that route.

As an aside, Archie is expanding the signature style of it's art. The Betty & Veronica titles have a somewhat more realistic art style (sort of an updated version of the old romance comics but with a cleaner line). I've also seen manga style Archies. Mind you, manga has been consuming all western pop culture for years now (I saw a Manga version of Star Trek the Original Series the other day at Words & Pictures. Of course, that just means the west gets to return the favour.

The topic changed as these things do, but it was still in the back of our minds. That's why wendy_licious spotted this strip and brought it to the rest of our attentions:

( Excerpt from Archie... )

So that settles it, they really do recycle stories from the depths of time (i.e. a time when teens used phonographs instead of those newfangled compact disc players) - they just do a half-assed job sometimes.

Thanks K, for letting me borrow your book long enough to scan.

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