Do they still publish? Are they still popular?
What never bothered me as a kid but seems extremely creepy now is how unrealistically innocent is the setting. In Riverdale, "bad" kids are kids who cheat at sports or commit acts of vandalism -- any more serious crime is left to adults, and there ain't much even of that. Nobody seems ever to have heard of drugs. Far more astonishing, nobody seems ever to have heard of sex. It is essential to Archie's character that he is girl-crazy, but his idea of a successful date is necking. No girl at Riverdale High ever gets pregnant or even seems to be aware of the possibility. Not even pregnant adults are ever portrayed. Current social and political issues are almost entirely ignored -- were ignored even during the 1960s and '70s. I recall one issue where the girls and women of Riverdale High consider "joining" "women's lib" (as if it were an organization), but reject it in favor of the old pedestal-treatment, and that's the end of that. The only thing that changes over time is the clothing, and sometimes not even that -- Jughead always wears a whoopie cap that was popular in the 1940s and has hardly been seen in real life since.
It is not, of course, particularly disturbing or surprising that the teenagers have been teenagers since 1939 -- it is an established convention of comic strips and comic books to have characters who never age. What is surprising is that the writers seem always to be living in 1939.
What never bothered me as a kid but seems extremely creepy now is how unrealistically innocent is the setting. In Riverdale, "bad" kids are kids who cheat at sports or commit acts of vandalism -- any more serious crime is left to adults, and there ain't much even of that. Nobody seems ever to have heard of drugs. Far more astonishing, nobody seems ever to have heard of sex. It is essential to Archie's character that he is girl-crazy, but his idea of a successful date is necking. No girl at Riverdale High ever gets pregnant or even seems to be aware of the possibility. Not even pregnant adults are ever portrayed. Current social and political issues are almost entirely ignored -- were ignored even during the 1960s and '70s. I recall one issue where the girls and women of Riverdale High consider "joining" "women's lib" (as if it were an organization), but reject it in favor of the old pedestal-treatment, and that's the end of that. The only thing that changes over time is the clothing, and sometimes not even that -- Jughead always wears a whoopie cap that was popular in the 1940s and has hardly been seen in real life since.
It is not, of course, particularly disturbing or surprising that the teenagers have been teenagers since 1939 -- it is an established convention of comic strips and comic books to have characters who never age. What is surprising is that the writers seem always to be living in 1939.
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