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Wait a minute, now. Aren't you two kids rushing things a bit?

Archie Comics has just announced that the 84-year-old teenager Archie Andrews is proposing to his girlfriend, Veronica Lodge, this August, in the first of a six-part-story called "Archie Marries Veronica."

This news arrived a week after the leak, on the Archie website, that Archie No. 600 would involve a marriage proposal, a tantalizing proposition designed to incite frantic speculation about Archie's choice. Whom would he pick? The blond, devoted and earthy Betty Cooper, or the spoiled, vain, rich and raven-haired Veronica?

No one knows why the publishers rushed to squash the suspense. Is it because the children who read Archie find the whole matter too abstract, or because the adults who remember Archie tired, long ago, of this soft, listing triangle? In any event, I applaud this inexplicable romantic hero - whose ginger, checked hair, unremarkable build and tacky clothes make him a very unlikely stud - for making such a bold decision. Finally.

The co-writer of Archie No. 600, Michael Uslan, calls the new storyline - which takes place five years in the future and which the publishers claim to be "The Archie Story of The Century" - "a really, really cool set-up."

It is not a stretch to compare Mr. Uslan's version of Archie and Veronica to his version of the Batman character The Joker, whom he reconceived as a psychopathic aristocrat in the edgy, malevolent Batman film The Dark Knight.

Though everyone knows that Veronica is the sexier of the two 17-year-olds, by virtue of her hair (which is never held back in a sporty ponytail, like Betty's), her sultry couture and hotly aloof mien, Betty remains the one of these two favoured by almost all men, largely because she is nice, and possibly because she is so enamoured of Archie she seems as if she would do anything for him.

Veronica, a near-villainess, is the Dark Knight to Betty's homely Commissioner Gordon (or any of the civilian characters who don't move in elite, tightly costumed circles). Yet there are so many Veronicas and Bettys. Archie, which began as one story in a Pep Comics superhero comic book, first turned into a standalone Archie comic book in late 1942. "The plan was to switch from a superhero fighting evildoers to an everyman with humour," Michael Silberkleit, the president and chairman of Archie Comics, told me in 2006. (Mr. Silberkleit died last year.) The switch was effected, and over the years, a wide variety of artists (as if Archie Andrews were as interpretable as Harvey Pekar of the autobiographical American Splendor series) have rendered the teenager, while another large group of writers developed madly different personalities for their Archies.

Flipping through an Archie Digest, which rounds up, randomly, the crazily old zoot-suit-and-jalopy stories together with the cat-eyed and sleek new version, one will find super-Christian Archie (who battled cynical hippies with the simple grace of God's love), Ultra-Student Archie (the saviour in plots against Riverdale High), beachy, sex-mad Archie, Archie B.C. (an idiotic caveman), Future Archie and Detective Archie, solving crimes with Betty as his equivalent of Velma Dinkley in the Scooby Doo series.

And while Archie, a pure pop icon whose endurance is measured by his adaptability (think, again, of the changing nature and form of Batman), exists on so many levels, his plain, bland and moral character never alters. Until, perhaps now, because he has always seemed to gravitate naturally back to Betty, who truly loves him, and is as good and decent as Veronica is selfish and cruel.

Mr. Silberkleit, as upright and foursquare as Archie's principal, Mr. Weatherbee, also told me that "Archie comics are good and wholesome, and may be a first real reading experience for children. We make sure they are safe, clean reading."

Big news in Straightsville

The conservatism of Mr. Silberkleit and his father, Louis, before him, ensured that the world of Archie would always exist in a plastic bubble, in spite of updates such as characters drawn in the Japanese manga style, text-messaging and radical shifts in the characters. Jughead went from being a crypto-gay teen to straight; Moose went from being frighteningly imbecilic and ultraviolent to dyslexic and merely virile; and so on. Yet the characters remained, all these years, immune to the revolution in graphic art, and so clean as to make Amish teens look like gangbangers.

That is why Archie choosing to follow his lust, not common sense - to tie himself to a woman certain to drive him wild and torture him like an exquisite monstress in a Scott Fitzgerald story - is big news in Straightsville, where the soda shop still has no liquor licence and a hot date consists of fine dining and dancing at a recondite, snooty French restaurant.

Any man or woman who grew up reading these comics has beheld, in awe, the impossible beauty of Betty, who looks like Marilyn Monroe dressed down to do some yard work, and Veronica, definitively modelled by the late, great artist Bob Montana, after Veronica Lake, who looks like a sable-haired Rita Hayworth.

Getting married is what these two ladies have been dreaming of since they were in elementary school in the Little Archie series. If one looks at the single women of Riverdale, one can imagine why.

There are the Riverdale High teachers (and cafeteria worker, respectively) Miss Grundy, Miss Haggley and Miss Beazley, an unholy trinity of shapeless, steel-haired and mildly disfigured spinsters. Beazley, a working stiff, is the worst, a purblind, lantern-jawed little ape, who is seen cooking vats of boiling filth in most strips.

And there is Big Ethel, the only teenage girl not shaped like Betty and Veronica (or Midge or the relatively new and pornographically hot Cheryl Blossom). Ethel is a buck-toothed stick-figure, who wears her small strands of hair in a loose child's bow and fiercely chases Jughead, often with a club.

In Riverdale, to be unmarried, or, concomitantly, too ugly to be eligible, is to be as invisible as Mrs. Lodge, Veronica's high-society, chronically absent mother.

The contemporary Betty-Veronica-Archie triangle (the two girls have been pulling each other's hair out for Archie since the get-go) is best compared to Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie in their respective relationships with Brad Pitt; the former pines languidly on, while the latter is photographed at all times, Cheshire-cat-smiling and content in her catch of this rat.

Ms. Aniston is widely admired for her wholesome, sunny beauty, which is as unthreatening, as implicitly compliant as Betty's.

Ms. Jolie's looks - and often sinister actions - are threatening and luridly so. Shortly after plucking Ms. Aniston's husband away, she and Mr. Pitt took off to a resort and had such crazed, loud sex that the proprietors thought that wild animals were mauling each other on the grounds.

Ravishing brunettes such as Veronica, throughout visual and literary history, are mysterious idols, rebellious wantons, alluring shooters of fire and ice. Think of Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair, Renoir's and Ingres' odalisques, Emma Bovary and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara.

Blondes are luscious and tactile, angelic and pleasing: consider Pamela Anderson, Tinker Bell, Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov and the lovely yet resigned barmaid in Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.

Or recall the 1950s love triangle of perky, pony-tailed Debbie Reynolds, preposterously sultry Elizabeth Taylor and hapless Eddie Fisher.

Sex with Veronica, marry Betty

Most men want to have sex with Veronica and marry Betty. Consequently, the choice that Archie is making is genuinely radical, and stands as a stunning revision of the series.

By choosing the hot woman, the challenge, the wild card, Archie is choosing to stop the arrow that Betty has been aiming at his heart for more than four decades, to say nothing of the knife she has been holding against his dreams and desires.

When Brad Pitt took up with Angelina Jolie, he became, incredibly, a doting parent and partner, and never appeared to miss the woman he called "Golden," his own devoted blonde.

Veronica Lodge cannot cook or sew or keep house. She loves to shop and pamper herself; she is imperious and has a fierce temper. But with her beauty, she is a teen Cleopatra, a haunting Jezebel.

She is the dark lady of Shakespeare and of fairy tales where little blondes are cast away or put to rest at the tip of a needle.

These are good days for those misunderstood blackguards, the enticing brunettes men love - think of My Best Friend's Wedding, of Julia Roberts versus Cameron Diaz - but never marry.

How will Archie be able to live with this princess, to satisfy her whims and outfit her with a diamond as big as the Ritz? Time, at long last, will tell.

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