40 | Steel Notes Magazine steelnotesmagazine . com | July 2014
Brodian ’ s Banter
There was a recent article about how Archie , in a new issue of Archie comics , gets shot and killed while defending his openly gay friend .
There was a recent article about how Archie , in a new issue of Archie Comics , gets shot and killed while defending his openly gay friend .
It used to be that you would only see references to things like homosexuality , guns and so forth in adult comic books - the kind where you had to be over 18 to buy them .
Some would say this is typical of our troubled times . I could blame things like Hollywood and MTV , but actually , this isn ’ t anything new . Archie has been around since 1941 .
Seven years earlier , Dick Tracy debuted and in the first strip he sees his fiancee ’ s father get shot to death by robbers . It was the first time that anyone had been gunned to death in the funny papers . But here again , it was typical of the times :
Gangster movies were popular ( Edward G . Robinson movies , the “ Roaring Twenties ” with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart ), people were reading about people such as John Dillinger , Al Capone , Bonnie and Clyde , and the public was eating it up .
However , society moved on from that . True , history repeated itself with the likes of the OJ Simpson car chase and trial , but it ’ s time to move away from all that . For entertainment , I think people are getting tired of shock value and want to go back to being entertained . :
40 | Steel Notes Magazine steelnotesmagazine . com | July 2014