When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait for the next issue of
Archie Andrews to appear on the newsstand. In case you aren’t familiar with
Archie, he is a comic book character who first appeared in 1941, along with his
two girlfriends Veronica and Betty, and his best friend Jughead. The story is
centered on Archie’s school activities and his romantic adventures with
Veronica and Betty. There were a couple of villains in the persons of the
school librarian and the principal, who tried unsuccessfully to dampen Archie’s
enthusiasm. There was a soda shop in town where the kids gathered, and the
occasional after school dance. Archie’s stories were wholesome, feel-good
events about the kind of people we all knew, with adventures that were somewhat
like our own.
When my daughter was small, we spent many hours reading
Archie comic books, each of us taking turns reading one page before the book
was reluctantly passed to the other. She would often turn sideways on the couch
trying to peek at the next page to see what was going to happen next. I confess
that I sometimes did the same. The publisher recently announced that the last issue
of the comic book will be published in July, and Archie will die while taking a
bullet for a friend.
Even though I haven’t read a comic book in years, Archie is
still there in my head and it saddens me that the publisher would allow him to
be killed off in this manner. I still cringe when I remember the flood of
emails I received when I killed off one of the main characters in my novel
Redemption. After I had thought about what I had done for a few days, I went
back and changed the ending and emailed the readers a copy of the chapter I had
changed. “Thank, you, thank you!” the next batch of emails said.
If there is a lesson for writers to learn from this, it is
the fact that Archie is a real person to most of us. It is hard to identify why
this is so, but if we ever manage to grab hold of this reality, some of us will
become famous in the same manner as Vic Bloom and Bob Montana did. Ours will join
the ranks of the other unforgettable characters like Archie, Scarlett O’Hara,
and James Bond. Most characters in literature are vastly different from the
rest of us, with nervous tics, larger than life characteristics, or the ability
to change from a wolf into a person. I think the magic in Archie is the fact
that he is so much like the rest of us that we are awed by the image he
presents. It is almost like looking in a mirror. Think about the characters in
your own novels. Why do you like them -- why should someone else. If they fall
short of your expectations, maybe it is because they aren’t enough like you or the
people who will read your books.
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