Orwellian Riverdale
I have been compiling — for my own amusement — a batch of pages from Archie Comics which saw the editors of the company make small alterations years later in reprinting in digests, particularly amused by somewhat arbitrary changes for anything inferring something sexual. A little less interesting but perhaps more profuse is the manner they have, over the years, changed references to current years — tending to look badly — so I recall an instance with everyone dressed in high 1970s polyester outfits supposedly now (or then) set in 1991.
Now here is an interesting 1983 issue from Archie Comics where the wacky gang in Riverdale see the encroaching totalitarian government squashing them at every turn — now set in 2018.
It appears that this title — Archie at Riverdale High — became the go to place for the company to dump turgid “serious issues”, comics as public service announcements — and lessons that belong in after school specials. So we get the obligatory “don’t smoke” propaganda, and the discovery that that dumb lunk head Moose isn’t dumb — he just has dyslexia. This issue of the series, I guess, is your Afterschool Special about the encroachment of Big Brother.
A little bit of kudos to the editors of the digest in reprint selections, as pre facing in the same issue is a more lightheaded allusion to Orwell which, I guess you can read as an earlier chapter to the story where it is shown that these civil liberties issues are swirling around in Archie’s head for when things escalate and things get serious and Mr. Weatherbee’s ego-maniacal tendencies explode into a power grab.
Actually the whole digest has stray political and civil liberties themes woven in from all directions — a story where the kids protest against a parking lot inspired by a student hippy girl sits along with a story where Archie “narcs” on a misguided delinquent kid who claims his “School Stinks” graffiti is a political statement– why, he’s right out of Dostoyevsky’s Demons! Mind you, the stories aren’t interesting in and of themselves but together it gets clever. (For the selection of ‘Archie 3000 stories, the editpr was probably kicking themself for having reprinted this too recently.)
But just as a reader of Archie digests are left wondering what polyester and huge collars doing in 1991, or a crude redrawing of a walkman playing “The Go-Gos” into an MP3 player playing “The Britney Spears” in the oughts, the change from 1983 to 2018 leaves to a simple problem: all very quaint, the 1983 surveillance system. If only we could go back to that! Today we have much more intrusive manners to monitor and affect behaviour of the student body — as we have seen stories of purchasing the service of an nsa-esque minitoring agency to folliw students’ social media accounts and stories of school laptops that can record students as they use them — wherever. So what is the point of retrofitting the year to 2018 when the technology does not follow apace?
And I will leave it to someone else to decide whether the change from 1983 to 2018 counts as “Orwellian”. I don’t think so — at any rate, we’ve seen worse.
As for the rest, I can’t help but note that Dilton’s hacking of the ATM and receiving gobs of money would not get him thanks from the local bank president for exposing the limits and errands of technology, so much as get him a felony prison sentence. And the manner in which the buteacratic red tape from a series of government regulations from, successively, an arrogant Pentagon, Labor Department, and EPA leaves Mr. Lodge in a Kafkaesque bind is moderately amusing.