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So, Archie is marrying Veronica? Or he is not. Actually, he is proposing to Veronica’s maid of honour, Betty Cooper. Or is he?

Confused?

You bet!

Some months ago, the publishers of Archie comics leaked to the media that Archie Andrews would finally choose between the two girls who had featured in the comic for decades. He would marry Veronica Lodge, the beautiful but spoilt millionaire’s daughter.

As most women are not millionaire’s daughters, do not think of themselves as being spoilt and pride themselves on their sweet disposition, there were howls of outrage from all around the world. Most women identified with Betty. How could they bear to see Archie end up with the hated Veronica?

According to the publishers of Archie comics, the response took them by surprise. They were particularly astonished by the vehemence of the Indian reaction. Apparently, something like 80 per cent of all readers wanted Archie to end up with Betty.

Now, gratified by the vast increase in sales this controversy has generated for the fast-fading title, the publishers have officially announced what’s really going to happen. People who follow the comic these days (all 20 or 30 of them – sales had collapsed till the announcement) will know that there is a path called Memory Lane which Archie frequently travels through. In a creative twist in an already bizarre creative invention, the publishers have decided that this time Memory Lane will allow Archie to glimpse into the future.

In one version of the future, he will marry Veronica. But in another, he will propose to Betty.

And what happens after that? When Archie returns from Memory Lane will the comic return to its normal continuity? We don’t know as yet. And perhaps the publishers don’t know either.

But one thing is for sure: the whole ‘Archie to marry Veronica’ thing was no more than a publicity stunt, a way of drawing attention to a tired old title.

As publicity stunts go, it was well thought-out. If they had announced that Archie was going to marry Betty, most readers would have sat back, satisfied that justice had been done. But by making him marry (or not marry, as the case may be) the unpopular Veronica, the publishers engineered a global controversy which served their commercial purposes.

Long-time readers of comics will be familiar with this stunt. In the so-called silver age of DC Comics, the writers would frequently resort to something called the Imaginary Story (suggesting that everything else that happened, from flying men and villains in space ships, was not imaginary but real) in which the comic book’s normal continuity was tossed aside.

Thus, Superman would marry mermaid Lori Lemaris or Lana Lang or even Lois Lane. Batman would reveal his secret identity to the world. Wonderwoman would give up her powers. Robin would come out, would move to San Francisco and adopt a new identity as Catamite Boy (okay, I made up the last one).

These Imaginary Stories would be trailer-ed in a manner that made us believe that they were real (within the normal continuity, that is) till we actually read them and discovered that they were mere flights of fancy. But they always ended up causing a bump in sales.

Later, when the sales of DC Comics had slumped to an all-time low, the desperate publishers began turning the imaginary stories into real ones. Robin would die. (Not to worry, a new Robin would take his place.) There would be a new Batman. (Not to worry, Bruce Wayne would return.) Superman would die. (Not to worry, he wasn’t really dead – Kryptonians don’t die so easily.)

Sometimes when sales hit a really rough patch, the entire continuity would be overhauled. DC Comics told us, for instance, many decades after he had been introduced, that Superboy did not really exist. Supergirl was killed off. And so on. I’ve stopped reading the comic but I gather that over the last year, the Batman book is undergoing some kind of metamorphosis.

Did these gimmicks work? I’m not sure they had anything other than a temporary impact on sales. And most times, they ended up pissing off old readers who did not want to see their universe shaken up.

But one interesting phenomenon emerged from these experiments. In the old days, when Superman appeared in several books (Superman, Action, World’s Finest, etc.) all the stories in every book had to stick to the same continuity. Even when superheroes appeared in other media, the continuity remained consistent. In the 60s, when the Batman TV show presented a campy version of the Caped Crusader, the comic book changed to reflect that altered avatar. There could not be two different kinds of Batman.

These days, however, several different continuities co-exist. The influential The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel on which Batman’s rebirth is predicated was set in the future and would have been called an Imaginary Story in the old days. Since then, the graphic novels have followed no continuity allowing authors to choose their own themes.

Nor have representations of superheroes in other media been constrained by comic book continuity. The Superboy TV show started after DC killed the character off. Eager to cash in on the success of the show, DC introduced a new Superboy comic which mirrored the TV show’s continuity but ignored the world of Superman (in which there was no Superboy).

Similarly, the Christopher Nolan re-booting of the Batman franchise has followed its own continuity with only a tenuous link to the story as told in the comics. DC has introduced books which try and capitalize on the popularity of the movie Batman while sticking to their own continuity for the comic book Batman.

All this can be confusing but it establishes the great truth of comic books in the 21st century: it’s not the stories that are important, it is the characters.

So, perhaps a day will come when it won’t matter who Archie has married. Perhaps there will be different books with different continuities: Archie could be married to Veronica in one, to Betty in another and to nobody in the third.

Which is a bit of a shame because frankly, it was much easier to cope with one set of characters living in a single continuity than it is to make sense of a world with so many parallel universes.

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Posted by Vir Sanghvi on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 7:11 pm 
Filed under Media · Tagged Archie, Batman, betty, Hindustan Times, kinds of Batman, news, The Dark Knight, Veronica

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