ARCHIE ANDREWS has
been a lot in the news lately. It was
reported that Archie will die in July.
Then, they said he won't die, his alter ego will die. I guess we will just have to see. When I reported it on facebook and this blog
some people were upset. It was like
losing an old friend. It didn't bother
me, we would have ran in different cliques in high school. His was a smiley face group and the group I
was in was either getting into trouble or lying ourselves out of trouble.
MAD comic book did a takeoff of ARCHIE and the ARCHIE
publishers didn't peep a word. A
few years later HELP Magazine did a takeoff on ARCHIE and the ARCHIE publishers carried HELP to court. HELP Magazine lost. They were ordered by the court, as part of
the settlement, never to print that story again.
What is ironic about
the order is that the same person, Harvey Kurtzman wrote both stories and Will
Elder was the artist for the both stores.
And if you read each story you will see that MAD treated the Archie
character mean, very critical. And the
Archie character in HELP Magazine was kind and idealistic. As Harvey Kurtzman said, PLAYBOY Magazine
should have been the one to sue, they were critical of PLAYBOY's pseudo yuppie
life style in the HELP version.
Why didn't the Archie people sue MAD? It probably had something to do with the
fathers of the publisher of ARCHIE and
the publisher of MAD were old friends and I think partners in an earlier comic
book publishing world.
Here are the two stories, the first is MAD'S take on ARCHIE
and second is HELP's version. See for yourself.
(click on images so that you can read the balloons and see what is going on).
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