The Corrupted American Innocence of Archie Comics

Prosperity and family and friendship—this was the promised landscape of Archie, the postwar fantasy on offer, though it’s notable that the comic started in 1941. It created a parallel space where the Second World War wasn’t happening, where innocence wasn’t interrupted by the violence thousands of miles off the page. Captain America may have been battling Adolf Hitler, but Archie was battling against his curfew and Reggie’s vaudeville machinations, the realm of flat tires and banana peels […]
 
The wishful idealism had been mediated by real people, the cartoonists and the writers, and so it couldn’t help but reveal itself as a truer picture of what America really was. Not the sunshine and the school dances but the more meagre sides of our natures, the dumb and prurient and thoughtless parts, all sanctioned by the appearance of nostalgia and middle-class values. If Archie was typically American, it was not because of its actual virtue but because of its deeply American insistence on its own virtuousness, impossible to maintain.