Publisher Of Archie Comics Announces It's Killing Title Character
By John Ostapkovich
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The publisher of Archie Comics announced this week that it was killing off the title character, but there's less to this story than you might think.
"Everything's Archie!!!!" Hardly.
Archie, while a known character in comics and cartoons, is small potatoes in terms of sales, a couple of thousand of comic books a month compared to 115,000 for one of the Batman titles.
The Archie who's being killed is not the teenaged one whose roots trace to the Andy Hardy movies in the 40's, but a grown-up Archie in a spin-off series called Life with Archie with dual story lines, one in which he's married to Betty, the other Veronica.
Archie Comics decided to wrap up the series with the title character getting fatally shot saving a friend in issue 36 and then issue 37 focusing on his lasting impact on his friends a year on.
Oddly, there's also a comic called Afterlife with Archie which kind of puts The Walking Dead plotline in Archie's fictional hometown Riverdale and since it's doing respectably there's talk of making a movie or TV show of it.
Talk about back from the dead.